The growing shortfall in available public funds in the United States appears now to be creating significant activity in private investment in the nation’s infrastructure and leading to the establishment of a growing number of private-public partnerships to implement these projects. Certainly, during the past several years there has been increasing interest in these investments and in the use of P3, but actual activity has been limited and largely confined to a few states.
Even now, much of this investment activity does not really represent new forms of private investment or new policy departures for the public sector. For example, many of these transactions have involved the purchase of marine terminals at the nation’s largest ports. However, private companies have been operating these terminals under leases or concessions with public or quasi-public port authorities for many years, so these new private investments often merely represent fairly