Introduction: The History of the European Infrastructure Finance: An Analytical Framework

How have socio-economic resources been mobilized to pay public works – affected by a fundamental intertemporal mismatch between social costs and benefits – from the Roman Age up to twenty century-Europe? This chapter tries to answer this question, first looking at finance in a broad sense, as a set of mechanisms bringing resources to infrastructure, second focusing on some core factors as technological and organizational change, public and private involvement, national and international drivers. A final taxonomy, then, outlines the macrotypes of infrastructure financing that have been analyzed in the book, showing clearly how it is impossible to identify a unique pattern of infrastructure finance that always and everywhere is superior in terms of long term-sustainability, growth and welfare effects. History teaches us that there are no recipes, but only a set of stories that may suggest some analogies to contemporary problems and may represent a way of testing conventional hypothesis.