Precise measures were taken for the construction of urban infrastructure in the 14th Five-Year Plan

We will promote the sound development of public infrastructure REITs

Industry insiders believe that urban infrastructure construction has the characteristics of a large amount of capital investment and a long construction period, which requires medium - and long-term funding to provide support.

It is expected that in the next few years, with the advancement of urbanization, China's urban infrastructure construction will continue to maintain a large scale of investment. How to timely and effectively solve the problem of financing construction will be a long-term problem faced by urban infrastructure construction.

Pan Helin believes that in the past few years, China has adopted mixed ownership and PPP to increase infrastructure supply, and these methods have indeed reduced the cost of urban infrastructure construction by local governments. However, it is also necessary to see that whether it is mixed ownership or PPP, the final investment needs to be recovered and cannot reflect the public nature. Therefore, urban infrastructure should distinguish between profitability and public. Public infrastructure should be government-led investment, and profitable public facilities can be built through PPP and mixed ownership.

The "Plan" proposes to distinguish the operational and non-operational attributes of relevant construction projects, establish a cooperation mechanism for risk sharing and benefit sharing between the government and social capital, and adopt various forms to promote public-private capital cooperation (PPP) in a standardized and orderly manner. We will promote the healthy development of real estate investment trusts (REITs) in the infrastructure sector and revitalize existing assets in urban infrastructure.

Infrastructure REITs are the hot market in recent years. Since the debut of the first nine public REITs in June 2021, a total of 14 have been listed successively, involving industrial parks, warehousing and logistics, highways and other infrastructure, raising a total of 54.1 billion yuan.

In the view of Deng Haiqing, chief economist of AVIC Fund, infrastructure public REITs have innovated financing channels, solved the problem of "where does the money for infrastructure investment come from", and provided a sustainable source of funds for infrastructure investment.