The price-tags for rebuilding Canada’s sagging public infrastructure and for alleviating global poverty happen to be in the same ballpark. Analysts recently estimated the shortfall in both areas at $250 billion each — and it’s expected that investors will play a big part in closing both gaps.

Historically, private investment and public policy have been distinct spheres. Governments took care of things such as building roads, maintaining sewage treatment facilities, and the control and construction of other common goods. Private investors, meanwhile, pursued their own ends largely through their investments in financial assets.

But new asset classes are emerging that blur those lines. Investors are starting to contribute their capital to two of the world’s more intractable financing dilemmas: public infrastructure projects and the individually tiny but collectively large funding needs of entrepreneurs in the developing world.

According to recent estimates, both those groups need about $250 billion worth of financing. Canada’s infrastructure needs are likely to be taken care of long before those of aspiring Third World start-ups, but both the infrastructure and poverty challenges are going to require a big hand from private investors.

Late last year, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities released a report warning that Canada has used up almost 80% of the productive capacity of its public infrastructure, much of which dates back to the 1950s. The FCM put a $123-billion price-tag on the restoration of that capacity, including more than $40 billion for community, cultural and recreational infrastructure; more than $31 billion for water and waste systems; $23 billion for transit; slightly less than $22 billion for transportation; and almost $8 billion for waste management. This estimate has more than doubled from 2003.

But that’s not all. The $123-billion estimate would just cover restoring existing infrastructure to its former glory, not the expansion required to accommodate future growth.

A recent report from CIBC World Markets Inc. estimates that fixing old systems, building new ones and meeting increasingly stringent environmental considerations would take the price-tag up to $240 billion.

“The tragic collapse of a Laval bridge near Montreal last fall captured all these statistics in one gloomy image,” the CIBC report notes. “But in many ways it worked as a catalyst for governments across Canada to start moving on the infrastructure front. And the difference is that now they can afford it.”

Indeed, the federal government announced a significant — $33 billion — infrastructure spending plan in its most recent budget, and the provinces are doing their part by ramping up their spending in this area as well.

Additionally, governments are embracing the helping hand of institutional inves-tors such as pension funds. Large funds that are eager to diversify their holdings, pension funds are particularly keen on infrastructure investment because these projects match their long-term funding needs.

“Infrastructure investment typically carries greater duration than 30-year government bonds,” analysts explain in CIBC report. “In addition to having bond-like characteristics, it has equity-like features, since revenue grows over time with demographic changes, providing pension funds an attractive hedge against inflation.”

The report estimates that Canadian pension funds have allocated about 5% of their assets to global infrastructure investments, up from just 2% a few years ago. Moreover, the report forecasts that allocation will grow to 10%-15% by 2015. Much of this investment is likely to be leveraged, so the actual cash available for construction would be significantly larger than the $200 billion estimated.

While this anticipated infrastructure investment boom may address the financing needs of hideously expensive public-works projects, there’s a similar funding need among the world’s poor. A new report from Deutsche Bank research estimates that there’s a US$250-billion funding gap in the world of microfinance, the business of making small loans to impoverished entrepreneurs in the developing world. There’s currently about US$25 billion devoted to microfinance; the bank estimates the need is around US$275 billion.

The report expects inves-tors to help to close this gap, too — although with not nearly the enthusiasm that’s expected in the large-scale infrastructure sector. By 2015, the report predicts that private investment in microfinance (both institutional and retail) will rise to US$20 billion, which, while far short of the overall need, is nevertheless a sharp jump from the US$4.4 billion that private investors are supplying today. (The bulk of that funding comes from institutions such as non-governmental organizations, co-operatives and specialized financial institutions.)

@page_break@From an investment perspective, microfinance remains a largely untapped niche, the Deutsche Bank report suggests. However, it suggests that several trends will help the microfinance sector evolve from a donor-driven model to a more commercial capital-market model.

Deutsche Bank’s forecast for significant growth in the sector over the next several years is based on the prediction that microfinance “will gradually evolve into a niche investment product that will increasingly attract retail inves-tors and benefit from the general strong rise in [socially responsible investment].”

Along with the social benefit of helping ameliorate poverty, the Deutsche Bank report suggests the sector can also meet investors’ baser needs, adding that microfinance offers “an attractive risk/return profile that is marked by largely stable financial returns, low credit default rates and low correlation to the mainstream financial assets as well as the general domestic economy.”

The report also notes that there’s preliminary evidence that the returns on microfinance are independent of the world’s major markets and economies. It proposes a number of possible reasons for this, including: the very different business models of microlenders and traditional lenders; the fact that microcredits are more closely monitored, allowing quicker adjustments to lending practices; that microfinance firms enjoy a continuous stream of funding from international development institutions; and that such projects usually employ less leverage so that they have less volatile earnings.

This apparent lack of return correlation means the sector may lure investors by offering portfolio diversification — a treasure that seems to have become increasingly scarce, thanks to the globalization of financial markets. “Ultimately, there is some evidence that it might even evolve into an asset class of its own over the long run,” says the Deutsche Bank report. It cautions, however, that there is the possibility “that the correlation of returns will increase over time, the more the microfinance sector is integrated in the domestic economy.”

In addition to projected growth in the demand for microfinance investments, the Deutsche Bank report foresees developments that will make this type of investing easier — including the evolution of lending institutions, making them more able to handle greater volumes of commercial funding (through securitizing their loans and going public themselves); and regulatory changes in developing countries to facilitate that investment.

For example, the report indicates that in late 2007, the German parliament agreed to “regulatory changes that are expected to enable retail investment funds to invest in the microfinance sector” by prescribing the microfinance assets they can hold and imposing other restrictions designed to ensure retail investor protection.

For now, however, it is notably easier for retail investors to play the boom in infrastructure investment. Most obviously, they can buy the stocks of the companies that will be part of this expected construction boom. And this trend isn’t confined to Canada’s fortunes, either, as the need for infrastructure construction is a global phenomenon. In the developed world, there’s a demand for maintaining, upgrading and rebuilding a good deal of the crumbling existing infrastructure. At the same time, countries require new construction to feed and sustain their rapid growth. The result is a rosy outlook for the firms that supply the raw materials to these projects, and for the companies that then put them together.

A recent report on the infrastructure sector from Toronto-based Blackmont Capital Inc. says: “We believe that the multi-year outlook for companies providing the services and products required to meet this need looks particularly strong.”

The Blackmont report notes that these companies include general construction contractors, engineering firms, mobile equipment suppliers and environmental firms.

The market is already recognizing this trend. CIBC World Markets reports that an index of companies it has constructed comprising firms that operate largely in the infrastructure sector has outperformed the overall market by about 37% over the past two years. It suggests that this period of outperformance has room to run.

“With both public and private money now pouring into the sector at an unprecedented pace, Canadian infrastructure companies are entering a golden era,” the report says, “with growing pricing power largely offsetting any cost pressures. Profit margins and valuations will continue to respond accordingly.”

Apart from the companies that actually do the infrastructure construction, other potential routes into the sector for retail investors include publicly traded firms that invest in infrastructure and investment funds that specialize in the area.

While the estimated funding deficits for both Canada’s public infrastructure and the world’s poorest entrepreneurs are estimated to be about the same, it is likely that our crumbling roads and bridges will be fixed much sooner than those entrepreneurs build their businesses. Still, the task of funding fledgling capitalists is expected to grow into an asset class of its own. IE