Introduction
A 2015 report by CAF, the Development Bank of Latin America, titled Public-Private Partnerships in Latin America, has shown that infrastructure investment levels in the region have historically oscillated between 1% and 2% of GDP, trailing far behind the 8%- 10% achieved in some countries in East Asia. More recently, Héctor L. García Salgó, regional president for Latin America of Bechtel, the US civil engineering group, said that infrastructure investment in the region is running at around 3% of GDP, whereas it should be at around 5%. McKinsey’s, a consultancy, calculates that if Latin America’s medium-income countries had infrastructure as good as that of Turkey or Bulgaria, their economic growth rates would be two percentage points faster than they are right now. Put simply, everything indicates that the region’s infrastructure is lagging behind.