The History of European Infrastructure Finance: An Analytical Framework

How can socio-economic resources be mobilized to pay for works that offer benefits only in the future, often in the distant future? We discuss what we understand by infrastructure, a term that can have different meanings/semantic contents, and whose definition issues reveal some recurrent conceptual problems. Finance is here understood in the very broad sense of a set of mechanisms bringing to investment, and future benefits, the resources needed in advance to pay for it. We offer a brief discussion of technological and organizational change, as several of our examples and other literature that we cite show that investment and finance decisions are deeply interwoven with knowledge, manageme…