Indicators suggest that although the pipeline is strengthening, it falls well short of projected needs.

There are no concrete figures to accurately and exhaustively quantify the magnitude of projects in development. Only a few countries publish data on projects in the prelaunch or investigatory stages. These tend to be countries with well-established track records of public–private partnerships (PPPs) in infrastructure, such as Canada, the UK, and Australia. Otherwise, publicly available data sources are usually either retrospective, cataloguing historical public or private participation in infrastructure, or quantify the future need for infrastructure expenditure in aggregate terms or by sector.

The available data highlight the significant gap between historical expenditures (government and private sector combined) and future needs: worldwide expenditures on infrastructure need to more than double by 2020. Most indicators suggest that a step-function increase in expenditure of this magnitude is unlikely to generate the desired results. Where noticeable increases in infrastructure expenditure are evident in the pipeline, the increase over historical expenditure is in the 20%–40% range. A closer look at the cases of Africa, Brazil, India, and Indonesia follows.