Infrastructure Needs and Pension Investments: Creating the Perfect Match

The life insurance and pensions sector manages large funds with a truly long time horizon. These investors therefore naturally seek long-dated assets to match their liabilities. Real assets or real cash flows are preferred in order to hedge against inflation, which is particularly relevant for pension funds in order to assure a decent purchasing power for their clients’ retirement income. Many countries have the daunting tasks of refurbishing and expanding infrastructure, maintaining and expanding public real estate – and doing this in an environmentally friendly manner. Well-conceived infrastructure investments promote productivity and efficiency in both the public and private sector and foster economic – potentially also “green” – growth. Large amounts of capital are needed. Many nations cannot tap the private capital markets as easily as before. Infrastructure investments could be the “perfect match” for a portion of pension savings. Therefore, the link between the capital at hand and its accessibility for infrastructure investments needs to be improved, via regulation, co-operation and communication that foster public-private partnerships, as well as government leadership.