In our December blog poll, we asked readers what ADB’s funding priority should be in 2017: climate finance, food security, access to credit for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), or infrastructure.

Over a third (37%) of respondents picked infrastructure as the top investment need for Asia and the Pacific. This comes as no surprise, given that ADB estimated in 2010 that the region needed to invest at least $800 billion a year until 2020 to close the region’s infrastructure gap. ADB recognizes that the best way to achieve this goal is to support private sector-led infrastructure projects.

Infrastructure investment currently accounts for about 70% of ADB’s non-sovereign lending, compared to 65% for sovereign lending. In April, ADB launched three new transaction advisory mandates to prepare and structure public-private partnership infrastructure projects, and kicked off the next phase of the flagship TAPI project to export up natural gas from Turkmenistan... — blogs.adb.org/blog