Government guarantees can help persuade private investors to finance valuable new infrastructure. But because their costs are hard to estimate and usually do not show up in the government's accounts, governments can be tempted to grant too many guarantees. Drawing on a diverse range of...

The book considers when governments should give guarantees to private investors. After describing the history of guarantees, and the challenges the politics and psychology create for good decisions, the book sets out principles for allocating risk (and therefore guarantees), techniques for...

ch. 1. Introduction : why conduct risk analysis? -- ch. 2. Cost risk analysis basics : the three-point estimate and an analytic solution, the method of moments -- ch. 3. What is Monte Carlo simulation and how does it apply to cost risk analysis? -- ch. 4. Collecting high-quality data on cost...