PPP investment data for developing Asia are taken from the World Banks's Private Participation in Infrastructure Database. This records contractual arrangements for infrastructure projects in low- and middle-income countries (based on a World Bank classification) that have reached financial closure, whereby private parties have assumed operating risks. The database covers projects in energy, telecommunication, transport, and water and sewerage contracted under management or lease contracts, concessions, new infrastructure projects, so-called greenfield projects, or divestitures. Because the database compiles only PPPs for low- and middle-income economies, PPP investments in Asia's high-income economies, such as the Republic of Korea and Singapore, are taken from country sources.
The investment amounts in the database and the data gathered from country sources represent the total investment commitments agreed at a PPP project's financial closure. Because of this, the PPP investments captured in this study may significantly differ to actual investments over a project's life cycle. Results using this data should, therefore, be interpreted as being in the upper bound of the size of PPPs (Romp and de Haan 2005). Kappeler and Nemoz (2010) and Romp and de Haan (2005) tackle the measurement issue by spreading the amount of investment commitment equally over certain years. Following Kappeler and Nemoz (2010), we spread the total transaction amounts over 5 years to arrive at annualized PPP investment.1 To be comparable across years, we convert the PPP investment series to constant 2011 international dollars.
Another data issue is the risk of incompleteness and inaccuracies. This particularly applies to the World Bank's Private Participation in Infrastructure Database, which draws its information exclusively from publicly available sources, and assumes that all sources are reliable.