Distinguished Lecture on Globalization
Private Finance for Public Infrastructure in Emerging Markets
The lecture was held on: 29 October 2024 (Tuesday).
For a recording of the lecture: [LINK].
Emerging-market and developing economies (EMDEs) lack infrastructure. A billion people live more than 2 kilometers from an all-weather road, and 1.2 billion have no access to electricity. This shortage of infrastructure is most acute in the Global South. In principle, a reallocation of savings from aging rich countries to the financing of efficient infrastructure investments in labor-abundant Africa (and elsewhere in the developing world) has the potential to boost growth for the poor and retirement-savings for the rich. Achieving the positive-sum outcome, however, requires a rational, data-driven framework that distinguishes infrastructure investments with verifiable productive potential, from those that will waste money and lead to debt crises.
This lecture will present a Dual-Hurdle-Framework (Gardner and Henry 2023) that distinguishes infrastructure investments that are good for society and have the economic potential to be underwritten by blended finance—private capital on commercial terms, alongside multilateral development bank (MDB) capital as a vote of confidence in country governance and policy—from those investments that are good for society but are not viable on commercial terms and therefore require concessional funding from multilateral and bilateral sources. Operationalizing the Dual Hurdle Framework to ensure an efficient allocation of all capital—
private, multilateral, and bilateral—requires the production and dissemination of data to compute the economic and financial returns on investments in EMDE infrastructure today of the quality and availability that the International Finance Corporation pioneered in 1981 for computing returns on emerging market portfolio equity.
About the speaker:
Peter Blair Henry is the Class of 1984 Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, senior fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Dean Emeritus of New York University's Leonard N. Stern School of Business. Henry is the former Konosuke Matsushita Professor of International Economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where his research was funded by a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He is the author of Turnaround: Third World Lessons for First World Growth (Basic Books, 2013). Henry currently serves as the Chair of the Board of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Organized by: The Cluster on the Challenges and Opportunities of Globalization at Dartmouth. With support from the Department of Economics, Department of Government, Tuck School of Business, and Dickey Center for International Understanding.
Previous Lectures
2023: Leah Boustan spoke on "Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success". Leah Boustan is a Professor of Economics at Princeton University, where she also serves as the Director of the Industrial Relations Section. She is co-director of the Development of the American Economy Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. (You can watch the lecture: here.)
2022: Sergei Guriev spoke on "Spin Dictators: Globalization and the Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century". Sergei Guriev is the Provost and a Professor of Econoics at Sciences Po, Paris. He is a former Rector of the New Economic School in Moscow (2004-2013) and former Chief Economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). (You can watch the lecture: here.)
2021: Beata Javorcik spoke on "Globalization after the Trade War and Covid-19: Business as Usual or Not?" Beata Javorcik is Chief Economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in London. She is on leave from the University of Oxford, where she is the first woman to hold a Statutory Professorship in Economics. (You can watch the lecture: here.)
Inaugural lecture, 2020: Pinelopi (Penny) Goldberg spoke on "Development in the Time of the Coronavirus Pandemic". Pinelopi (Penny) Koujianou Goldberg is the Elihu Professor of Economics at Yale University. She was Chief Economist of the World Bank Group between November 2018 and March 2020.
