Cross-border investment into low-carbon infrastructure: An empirical glance.

The global low-carbon transition requires a tremendous boost in low-carbon infrastructure investment, and cross-border investment has a large role to play. This working paper provides a granular overview of investments into low-carbon infrastructure, both in the real economy and financial market. The descriptive analysis shows that there is room to scale up cross-border infrastructure investment and to shift investment into low-carbon assets. Specifically, low-carbon cross-border investment can be increased by shifting infrastructure investments, that currently flow into the financial economy, to the real economy and by incentivising the use of financing instruments, i.e., securitised products, that bundle projects and meet different liquidity tastes of investors. The analysis also highlights the important role of foreign direct investment (FDI) into infrastructure from foreign real economy companies (i.e., greenfield FDI into infrastructure). To date, greenfield FDI into infrastructure assets are still concentrated in assets that are not lowcarbon, especially in more developed countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]