Innovative road infrastructure financing in Jamaica and the developing countries

The implementation of innovative road infrastructure financing in Jamaica is of paramount importance, mainly due to the existing insufficient and untimely sources of financing generated through budgetary allocation. The budgetary allocation derived from annual tax revenue has failed to meet the needs of road infrastructure management over a number of years and left road infrastructure in poor condition; resulting high socio-economic costs, including high vehicle operating cost, extended travel time, decline in infrastructure asset value and long term high infrastructure management cost to the public-sector, tax-payer and road-user. Through a critical review of existing financing models, this paper introduces most suitable innovative private financing business model for Jamaica, which could be implemented through the creation of Pooled Road Fund Bank (PRFB) with a commercial nature. The fund would be pooled from domestic and overseas sources, including road-user charges, grants, soft loans and bond, and implemented through Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) scheme. This would result the public-sector, tax-payer and road-user obtaining value-for-money (VfM) based on whole-life-cycle costing.