The Olmos Project: Value Creation and Value Capture

Private investment in public infrastructure can be encouraged when there are multiple avenues to capture and to share the value created by such a project. Gains in the market value of land adjacent to projects are not customarily channeled back into defraying the original capital cost of the project—but they can be. This case uses irrigation, agriculture, land values, and an arrangement between the local government in northern Peru and the privatizer firm to accomplish the irrigation of vast areas of land, leading to jobs and GDP growth in the state, based on a combination of fees for water, auction price for raw land, investment in enabling infrastructure, and market value increases for irrigated land. The mechanics of this three-component deal (land company, water distribution company, construction company) are tracked on a pro forma multi-year cash flow basis with the ability to make and test a variety of different assumptions. The choice of an agricultural setting with one possible use case (farming at ground level) leads in to more complex value capture analyses. Real estate, for example, can have more dimensions (more floors allowed) and more use cases (retail, housing, office) than does agriculture. The local government can accomplish hundreds of millions of dollars of construction without advancing any funds to do so.