Stéphane Straub

Since September 2023, I am Chief Economist for Infrastructure at the World Bank. The Office of the Chief Economist for Infrastructure produces comprehensive knowledge pertaining to policy and institutional reforms in the areas of Energy and Extractives, Transport, Urban, and Infrastructure Finance. The office also provides analytical quality assurance across the Infrastructure Vice Presidency, covering energy, transport, urban, and infrastructure finance. It also works extensively on digital topics — from AI and data centers to cybersecurity — which were part of the VP's mandate when I joined and remain deeply intertwined with it: the energy-digital nexus in particular.

The Research Program

The Infrastructure Chief Economist Office develops a research program whose main component is focused on estimating the social rates of return of infrastructure across sectors and countries, to guide the prioritization of investments and support the attraction of private and commercial capital.

To that end, we assembled a new worldwide database of infrastructure capital stocks and construction costs, for the energy, transport, digital, and water and sanitation sectors, which we use to estimate rates of return of infrastructure investments across countries and sectors.

The published report Infrastructure Foundations: From Current Assets to Future Growth provides governments and development partners with a new, evidence-based framework to prioritize infrastructure investment where it delivers the greatest social and economic returns.

Other lines of work I am involved in include:

• The analysis of the so-called "digital enablement" effect — whether digital technologies have the potential to enhance efficiency and reduce GHG emissions throughout the economy and in particular in other infrastructure sectors such as energy. A submitted paper with Christopher Dann uses input-output networks to assess the green digital transition at scale.

• How digital technologies in general, and AI in particular, shape the job agenda in emerging and developing economies.

• Cybersecurity and its impact on economic activity and in particular on critical infrastructures. I sit on the Executive Committee of the Center for Cyber Economics, created by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Global Cybersecurity Forum (GCF).

• Infrastructure maintenance: how digital technologies — from remote sensing to AI diagnostics — are transforming what engineers and economists can jointly do to optimize maintenance decisions, improve asset longevity, and reduce lifecycle costs.

• The energy efficiency agenda, with a focus on demand management programs.

• Transportation public-private partnerships (PPPs) in Latin America, with a focus on understanding their financial structure, and their maintenance and safety implications using fine geospatial data on road quality.

• New urban development forms, including private cities and urban PPPs.

In addition, the office provides broad support to analytical efforts related to infrastructure issues throughout the World Bank Group, and publishes regular blogs, working papers, and journal articles. In 2025, we contributed a report on infrastructure and poverty reduction to the G20 Infrastructure Working Group under the Brazilian Presidency, jointly with the IDB.

The Infrastructure Data & Diagnostics Program

We curate and maintain the infrastructure section of Data 360 — the World Bank's unified data portal covering all sectors and development topics — serving as a single entry point for infrastructure data created or gathered across World Bank departments. It also serves as a resource for country-specific diagnostic work aimed at supporting the definition of operational priorities. Within its first year, Data 360 became the most visited page on the WBG website after the main landing page, drawing several million visits from governments, investors, and practitioners worldwide.

Seminars and Conferences

We organize regular conferences, workshops, and seminars. Our flagship event is a yearly high-level conference, Infra4Dev, which promotes dialogue and exchange between leading economic researchers and the wider community of policymakers and practitioners on leveraging infrastructure for development.

In 2024, we partnered with University Mohammed VI Polytechnic (UM6P) for the fourth annual #Infra4Dev Conference, held on 9–10 May 2024 in Rabat, Morocco.

In 2025, we partnered with Lingnan College of Sun Yat-sen University for the fifth annual Infra4Dev Conference, held on 15–16 May 2025 in Guangzhou, China.

In 2026, the sixth edition will be held in Nairobi, Kenya.

In October 2026, the World Infrastructure Forum — a new annual initiative co-founded last year with MIT, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), and the University of Texas at Austin — will hold its inaugural event in Madrid, bringing together researchers, policymakers, and private sector leaders around the economics and financing of global infrastructure.

Academic Life

Between 2008 and 2023, I was professor of economics at the Toulouse School of Economics, Université Toulouse Capitole, where I remain an associate member. I have held academic positions in the US, the UK, and France, and was President of the European Development Network (EUDN) between 2018 and 2023, leading a network of 150 economists across more than 20 institutions.

My research focuses on infrastructure, procurement, and institutional development in developing countries. A first part of my agenda covers contractual arrangements for infrastructure projects — concessions and public-private partnerships (PPPs) — spanning transport, energy, water and sanitation, and digital. With my late advisor Jean-Jacques Laffont and Luis Guasch, we studied concession renegotiations. With David Martimort, I have worked on utilities regulation, ownership, and financing. With Anaïs Fabre, we published a comprehensive review of the empirical evidence on PPP performance in the Journal of Economic Literature (2023). Another strand focuses on the impact of roads, electricity, and infrastructure access on firms and households.

On procurement, I have worked on corruption with Emmanuelle Auriol, on drug procurement efficiency in low-income countries with Pierre Dubois and Yassine Lefouili, and on revolving doors in health procurement in Brazil with Klenio Barbosa.

Current research extends to the intersection of digital technologies and the green transition, and to the economic implications of cybersecurity risks to critical infrastructure.

One overarching question across this agenda is how public investment in infrastructure and the related procurement process — representing between 60 and 80 percent of all infrastructure investment — can be made more efficient. I address these issues with a mix of applied theory and empirical methods, using administrative data, surveys, and experiments.

Prior to my PhD, I lived for ten years in Paraguay (1989–1998), where I worked as an entrepreneur, private consultant, government adviser, and university professor. I have written about this experience in Frontières, available as an ebook on Amazon.