The information stored in the Private Participation in Infrastructure database is downloadable to HTML, Excel, or Word files through snapshot reports. Excel and Word downloads are made available for ease of data manipulation. If a project has multiple characteristics or entries in the database then the project will repeat as many times as entries in the Excel file. For example, a project with two types of technologies will be listed twice in the Excel file with the each technology listed in one line. However, in the Word files, the project is listed only once. Alternatively, a simplified version of the database can be downloaded as a Microsoft Access file.

The PPI Project Database records total investment in infrastructure projects with private participation, not private investment alone. Investment commitments include expenditures on facility expansion, divestiture revenues, and license or canon fees.

Recording information on public investment in infrastructure projects, on a reliable and consistent basis, would require not only collecting public investment data disaggregated at sector level for each developing country but also having a common methodology for developing economies on what and how data are collected. Currently most countries do not report data on public investment disaggregated at the sector level nor do they use similar methodologies to collect public investment data.

The Database focuses on projects with private participation in infrastructure and therefore records infrastructure projects that are owned or managed by private companies. These projects may or may have not World Bank involvement. In addition, there are infrastructure projects in developing countries supported by the World Bank that do not have private sector participation and therefore are not included in the PPI Project Database. To find out about the World Bank Groups involvement in infrastructure projects in developing countries visit the World Bank website

The Database records the involvement of the World Bank Group ("IRD,IDA,IFC or MIGA") in infrastructure projects with private participation in low- and middle-income countries as defined in the Databases methodology for multilateral bank support through direct loans to project companies, equity participation, and guarantees. Other types of World Bank involvement such as technical and financial assistance for the design, tender, and monitoring of infrastructure projects with private participation, advice on PPI reforms, sector reform loans and others types of support are not recorded by the Database. 

There are three primary reasons that explain the differences. First, investment figures in the Database are recorded in nominal terms, while investment data for the listed publications on trends in PPI are adjusted by the US CPI using the last year of available data as the base year. Second, the records of projects that reached financial closure in previous years were revised during the last update; some new projects for this period were added while others were deleted when additional information became available. The Database has a conservative approach for entering projects and when it is not clear if an infrastructure project has private participation or reached financial closure at the time of the update, the project is not entered into the database until more accurate information is obtained. Third, classification of some countries has changed over time -- see Glossary for definition of country income group and IDA status. The changes between the country classification used in 2010 and 2011 updates are:

Reports from the PPI Project Database can generate different results depending on the type of report selected. For aggregated data, the reports with the cleanest totals are the most general ones:

• Data aggregated only by investment year (or financial closure) and primary sector
• Data aggregated only by investment year (or financial closure) and typeof PPI

Please see glossary of terms section.

For most projects the Database records investment commitments in the year of financial closure. However, where divestitures are phased or where investment requirements are defined by commitments on service coverage and quality and data are available (such as for large privatized electricity and telecommunications companies), the investments are recorded in the years in which the transactions took place.

No. Investment and other information on canceled projects are maintained in the database and are only modified when the project is re-awarded.