Research Opportunity: Identifying the "New Players" in Emerging Markets Infrastructure

Funding Available: $3000 tuition, $3000 salary (approx.)

Timeline
Research to be completed in the next three to four months, with a final presentation at the 3rd General Counsels' Roundtable next January or February.

Project Description
At CRGP's recent General Counsels' Roundtable, a number of senior legal advisors at firms like the World Bank, Ex-Im Bank, and Bechtel (see Appendix I) confirmed the view that there are a new set of Chinese, Malaysian, Arabian and other developing world investors who are beginning to invest in infrastructure - i.e. water, power, roads, etc. - in emerging markets in a serious way.

Whats more, these so-called "new players" may have a number of considerable advantages over Western firms: (1) they may have a different "risk-return" calculus in how they assess and manage political dynamics, (2) they may not attract the same levels of opposition from Western NGOs and in they may be more immune to such opposition; (3) in many cases they may have lower costs of capital due to home government subsidies, and (4) they generally tend to pay much lower wages to staff and managers.

For more information about the Roundtable: The objective of this research is to begin to identify the origins and the rise of these new players. This research is exploratory in nature, and is expected to involve a significant amount of detective work on the part of the student to track-down and triangulate between multiple data sources, possibly including some of the following:

Primary Sources
1. Interviews - eg. we can put you in touch with senior lawyers and business executives who attended our Roundtable, infrastructure experts at multilaterals (ie. Estache, Guasch, Goodland at World Bank), professors at business schools who do research in this area (ie. Esty, Wells at Harvard), etc.

Secondary Sources
1. Academic Journals - eg. Project Finance International
2. Trade Publications - eg. http://www.people.hbs.edu/besty/projfinportal/magazines.htm
3. Newspapers - Bloomberg, New York Times, etc. - eg. article: http://crgp.stanford.edu/news/community_weblog_160.html
4. Financial Statements of targeted firms as available;

Contact
Ryan Orr, Executive Director, Collaboratory for Research on Global Projects, rjorr@stanford.edu (650)575-9365

Application Instructions
If you are a first year GSB student (or if you plan to be around Stanford next Jan/Feb), please send a concise one paragraph statement of how your experience and interests could allow you to contribute to the success of this project.

Application Deadline
ASAP

Posted by rjorr at April 12, 2006 2:34 PM