Quality Regulation as an Investment Attraction Factor in Port Infrastructure

Latin America needs to significantly expand its investments in infrastructure. Ports, railways, roads, energy, and sanitation require resources on a scale that can hardly be covered solely by the region's governments. According to a recent estimate by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Latin America and the Caribbean will need to mobilize close to USD 1.6 trillion between 2025 and 2030 to meet the infrastructure needs associated with the region's development goals.

In this context, attracting private capital, including foreign capital, is not just a financing alternative, but an important condition to accelerate infrastructure modernization and strengthen regional competitiveness.

The debate on how to achieve this usually focuses on concessions, public-private partnerships, guarantees, development bank financing, and tax incentives. All these instruments are relevant. However, there is another factor that should occupy a more prominent place in this discussion: the State's capacity to transform an investment intention into an effectively authorized, contracted, and executed project. From this perspective, the quality of regulation must also be understood as part of the investment attraction policy.

Infrastructure projects involve public assets, long-term contracts, significant environmental impacts, and, in many cases, concentrated markets. Therefore, transparency, competition, supervision, and legal certainty are indispensable. The problem arises when control and complexity become synonymous and new requirements are incorporated without a clear evaluation of the risk they actually help reduce.

In Brazil, for example, the OECD's Foundations for Growth and Competitiveness 2026 report indicates that the country is among the economies with the highest levels of restrictiveness according to the Product Market Regulation indicator. This institutional dimension is also reflected in investors' perceptions. A survey conducted by the IDB in partnership with Mercer identified regulatory uncertainty among the most relevant risks for infrastructure investments in emerging markets, including Latin America.

In the port sector, differences in deadlines help to gauge the effect of regulatory design. In Brazil, according to the OECD, the traditional process for leasing terminals in public ports took, on average, 28 months. Even for private-use port terminals, subject to a more flexible authorization regime, the procedure could involve up to 18 stages. In other markets, the recorded deadlines are significantly shorter. In Colombia, a reform implemented in 2014 reduced the port concession process from approximately twelve to five months. In the Philippines, the report notes that a license to build and operate a private port could be granted within 60 to 85 days.

Evidently, these are not legally equivalent processes, which prevents a direct comparison between the deadlines. Even so, the difference in the order of magnitude shows how institutional design can influence the time needed to transform an investment decision into an effective project.

The OECD itself concludes that, in the case of Brazilian private terminals, the number of entities involved and the processing time reduce incentives for entry and can cause companies to lose opportunities while waiting for a decision. In the case of leases in public ports, the organization points out that the centralization of decision-making and the number of participating bodies prolong the process, which can keep terminals idle and deter potential interested parties.

There is also an important aspect related to institutional design. Faced with problems or failures, the public sector's response usually consists of adding new stages, requirements, or approval instances. Each measure may have a reasonable justification when analyzed in isolation, but the sum of individually defensible controls can produce excessively complex processes.

Therefore, the discussion should not be limited to the number of existing regulations, but to the risk that each of them effectively reduces. Requirements that mitigate environmental risks, expand competition, combat irregularities, or improve the quality of projects fulfill a clear function. In contrast, redundant analyses, overlapping competencies, and stages without reasonably defined deadlines can add time and costs without generating proportional benefits for the public interest.

This does not mean advocating for deregulation. Good regulation also protects the investor, the State, and society. The question is how to build processes capable of combining control, predictability, and decision-making capacity.

The OECD, for example, recommends reducing the number of bodies involved in the authorization process for private terminals and creating mechanisms that allow the project to advance once certain stages have been completed, without having to wait for the entire procedure to finish. For public ports, the organization also advocates for greater autonomy for qualified port authorities in managing leases, considering that decentralization can make the process faster and more efficient.

This discussion becomes relevant because the capital available for infrastructure is competed for by different projects and countries. Demand, location, costs, and expected profitability will continue to be determining factors, but the institutional capacity to transform a viable project into an effectively executed investment also influences the attractiveness of a market.

Therefore, improving the investment climate does not depend solely on financial incentives, guarantees, or public financing. It also requires a regulatory agenda capable of reducing duplications, improving coordination between institutions, increasing process predictability, and strengthening the State's decision-making capacity.

In a region that needs to mobilize significant volumes of capital to overcome its infrastructure deficits, regulatory quality ceases to be a merely administrative issue. It becomes a factor of competitiveness. Capital seeks legal certainty, predictability, and execution capacity. Countries capable of transforming viable projects into effectively materialized investments tend to attract more resources, accelerate the expansion of their infrastructure, and expand their development opportunities. The difference, therefore, is not necessarily in regulating less, but in regulating better.