Graduate Student, Geography
Brasenose College
Thesis Title: Role of capital markets in the supply and demand of global infrastructures
About
• Private provision of infrastructures such as water supply, power, energy, roads, ports etc.
• Infrastructures as private goods as opposed to being public goods.
• Role of capital market innovations in changing the way such large-scale investments materialise.
• Role of technological innovation in changing the way infrastructures are used and supplied.
• Demand driven vs. supply driven provision of infrastructures.
Here is the abstract of my thesis at Oxford:
Infrastructures have traditionally been thought of as public goods that ought to be supplied by the government. The argument for monopolised government supply has rested on four reasons that infrastructures, being public goods, are (i) non-excludable, (ii) non-rivalrous, that they have (iii) large positive benefits to the society which can not be priced, and last, (iv) they have tendency towards natural monopoly. In this dissertation I will argue that such a supply side paradigm in which the government acts as a monopoly supplier appears empirically to be resting on thin ice. Evidence from empirical case studies suggests that new technologies and financial innovations have led to a critical transformation rendering infrastructures excludable and rivalrous while also making the issue of natural monopoly irrelevant. Lastly, the massive scale and sophistication acquired by financial markets looks adept at fencing around positive externalities. Infrastructures, despite their sheer scale, progressively resemble other private goods such as breakfast cereal or television sets subject to market pricing, market-segmentation, product-differentiation, and competition etc. These trends suggest a shift in favour of a demand driven paradigm of infrastructure provision mediated by institutions of financial markets. The development towards market pricing of infrastructures, regardless of whether the government or private sector owns infrastructure assets, is likely to be most conducive to long-term efficiency and sustainability of an economic space.
Contact Information
skype: atifansar