Unlocking Private Investment in Sustainable Infrastructure in Asia Edited by Bhajan Grewal, Nella Hendriyetty, Iskandar Abdullaev, Chul Ju Kim, Naoyuki Yoshino and Eisa Khan Ayoob Ayoobi

Part I
Assessing the Impacts of 
Investments and the Future 
of Sustainable Infrastructure

1 Infrastructure Investment and 
Managerial Oversight
A Pathway to Regional Growth
Eugene Chao and Necmettin Kaymaz
1.1 Introduction
Infrastructure is a national asset for economic productivity. Government 
spending on infrastructure investment, along with a significant amount of cap-

ital infill and endorsement from the multilateral banks, has become a common 
scheme to transform a nation’s long-term competitiveness and facilitate regional 
integration (Bivens 2017; EIB 2018h, Leduc and Wilson 2012, 2014; Warner 
2014), with examples that include the Belt and Road Initiative in the 2010–
2020s; the Juncker Plan of the European Investment Bank, and the Central Asia 
transport strategy of the Asian Development Bank and the Central Asia Regional 
Economic Cooperation (CAREC) (ADB 2019a; European Commission 2018; 
The Economist 2018; CAREC 2020). Reviewing these transformative periods, 
infrastructure investment undoubtedly boosted national GDPs but left disastrous 
outstanding liabilities on each government’s balance sheet (Hamada 2016a,b; 
IMF 2019; 中国发展研究基金会 2016a,b). In the realm of delivering public 
goods, what are the roles the government leaders, capital enablers, and state-

owned enterprises (SOEs) should take? What scale and magnitude of investment 
are enough to achieve the intended environmental, social and governance (ESG) 
outcome and investment return? Which investment will create the most value? 
Is there an interrelation or a contradiction of investing in different infrastruc-

ture assets in terms of investment return and regional integration? What are the 
corresponding measures to avoid the likelihood of investment offset? How could 
policy formation and managerial strategy complement each other to maximize 
synergistic value among the investments to further empower a region’s long-term 
competitiveness? The article distills these decisive questions, revealing the invest-

ment landscape of common city assets and the important distinction between 
value-creating vs. value-destroying projects.
Many countries, while investing in infrastructure, often face these challenges:
I. Prior to fund allocation, the prerequisite is to define what kind of city people 
want. Cities built around transit and rail, for example, are different from 
those built around cars and highways. How can countries create a greener 
and more livable city and region while increasing their return on investment 

Unlocking Private Investment in Sustainable Infrastructure in Asia Edited by Bhajan Grewal, Nella Hendriyetty, Iskandar Abdullaev, Chul Ju Kim, Naoyuki Yoshino and Eisa Khan Ayoob Ayoobi