As the global context of infrastructure financing evolves, how to advance the policy issues most important to ensuring resilient infrastructure can be financed, in both developed and emerging markets, is a critical consideration. With the fiscal space for infrastructure narrowing, it is essential that resilience remains a key policy issue and the momentum to finance is maintained and supported by good governance of infrastructure. The current context requires a revisit of how governance can support financing to be better secured for the various infrastructure resilience needs. Technological advances also impact how resilience of infrastructure needs to be addressed both in terms of development and operation to secure the necessary infrastructure. This session will discuss how policy issues can be advanced to ensure greater infrastructure financing towards resilience with better public investment management and private capital mobilisation. The session will also discuss how these issues are being confronted in different countries, including the reforms countries make to strengthen infrastructure resilience through governance as well as innovative financial instruments.

Countries that experience both real and perceived political risk can experience difficulty in accessing financing, both public and private. To address this, political risk insurance can enable financing to overcome key barriers that can inhibit financing opportunities for infrastructure. This is particularly important in conflict situations when political risk is elevated to war risk; whether a country is directly involved or not, geographical proximity or supply-chain network can also expose countries to political risk if investors deem the effects of a conflict could spill over. This session will discuss the features of political risk insurance from the supply- and demand-side, with a particular focus on high political risk that can hamper investment efforts despite bankable infrastructure projects being available. The challenges of accessing political risk insurance will be discussed with input from both the public and private sector providers, as well as countries that could benefit from such financial instruments.

Many countries face challenges delivering infrastructure that responds to the needs of growing populations and emerging risks while operating within tight fiscal constraints. This requires countries to maximise achieving value for money, so investment programmes are resilient to shock events, such as fiscal shocks. In response, several countries have been strengthening how they plan, prioritise, fund, monitor and report on public investments. This involves centres of government adopting more strategic oversight of public investment decisions across government, and putting in place more consistent, rigorous rules for how ministries select and manage infrastructure. This session will illustrate case studies from several countries where reforms have recently been made, with lessons also from countries with longer-standing, high maturity public investment settings.

Subnational governments carry out over 55% of public investment in the OECD and are directly responsible for building and maintaining a significant proportion of government infrastructure, including that related to the energy and digital transitions. However, previous episodes of fiscal consolidation, sometimes resulting in cuts to capital transfers from central governments, have shown that subnational governments often use public investment as an adjustment variable. Economic shocks can have similar effects. Their room for manoeuvre to maintain investment may be particularly limited when they have low tax autonomy and restricted access to borrowing. This leaves them with few options other than postponing or cancelling investment projects. In addition, disparities across jurisdictions exacerbate the problem, with fiscally stronger regions and cities being better able to raise revenues and sustain investment, while many smaller and poorer ones struggle to maintain basic capital spending. This session will examine how existing funding and financing frameworks shape the ability of regions and cities to maintain investment during periods of fiscal stress and how resilient subnational investment is responding to shocks across territories, drawing on recent OECD work on subnational fiscal frameworks and the multi-level governance of public investment.

Digital infrastructure — broadband access networks, fibre backhaul, submarine cables, Internet Exchange Points, data centres, content delivery networks, cloud infrastructure, and compute capacity (including semiconductors) — is the foundation for all transformative digital technologies, underpinning productivity growth, innovation and business competitiveness, and, critically, artificial intelligence. This session will explore the critical role of resilient communication networks in a world increasingly dependent on connectivity, and the challenges policymakers face in protecting networks from system failures, malicious actions, and natural disasters. It will also raise issues related to bottlenecks to the investments needed to ensure resilient communication networks of the future.

In 2023, during India’s G20 Presidency, the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (IMEC) was launched as a trade initiative encompassing multimodal transport, energy connectivity, and digital infrastructure. Due to its potential to contribute to supply chain security, regional economic integration, local value addition, and long-distance trade between India and Europe, it has emerged as a promising alternative to existing trans-continental trade routes. The evolving geopolitical context in the Middle East has further increased its momentum, transforming IMEC from a linear route into a network of corridors, thus strengthening and dispersing its potential economic and security benefits. The OECD report “Measuring Connectivity along the India–Middle East–Europe Corridor” offers a series of technical analyses based on the OECD Corridors’ Connectivity Scoreboard, which measures hard and soft connectivity through internationally comparable data, with in-depth analysis of transport infrastructure and trade facilitation along the corridor. The aim is to comprehend IMEC’s opportunities and challenges, support informed decision-making, strengthen trust and partnerships, and promote co-ordinated approach to the future development of IMEC.

Regional economic corridors can strengthen economic resilience, competitiveness and growth by creating faster, more reliable and diversified connections between markets. Their potential, however, depends not only on infrastructure projects. Effective corridors require integrated multimodal transport, but also energy, digital and logistics networks, underpinned by enabling policy and regulatory frameworks that facilitate cross-border trade and translate improved connectivity into wider economic opportunities. The OECD developed the Corridors’ Connectivity Scoreboard, an indicator-based tool measuring efficiency and completeness of multi-modal transport along a corridor (hard connectivity) and assessing regulatory convergence and discrepancy (soft connectivity), with a view to inform policy makers, support targeted reforms and strengthen co-ordination across countries and partners to maximise the economic benefits of corridors. The Scoreboard is being applied to a number of corridors, and most recently to the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (IMEC). With a focus on IMEC, this session will explore how to operationalise efficient corridors and maximise their impact. Discussions will consider the essential infrastructure and investment requirements across corridors, and how greater multimodality and interoperability can support seamless connectivity. The session will also examine how stronger cross-border co-operation and co-ordination across stakeholders can support efficient implementation, enabling corridor development to deliver more resilient and sustainable growth.