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Infrastructure plays a key role in fostering growth and productivity and has been linked to improved earnings, health, and education levels for the poor. Yet Latin America and the Caribbean are currently faced with a dangerous combination of relatively low public and private infrastructure investment. Those investment levels must increase, and it can be done. If Latin American and Caribbean governments are to increase infrastructure investment in politically feasible ways, it is critical that they learn from experience and have an accurate idea of future impacts. This book contributes to this aim by producing what is arguably the most comprehensive privatization impact analysis in the region to date, drawing on an extremely comprehensive dataset.

Background Public health facilities often manage high volumes of HIV clients and face challenges with long wait times, poor client satisfaction, and low retention in care. The private sector is a major provider of health services in many countries but is a relatively untapped resource for reducing congestion in high-volume public HIV facilities and increasing access to HIV services, particularly for clients who already use the private sector as their first point of care. Private banks, corporations, and clients themselves can also be a resource for generating additional financing for HIV and reducing reliance on donor funding. Through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief’s Sustainable Financing Initiative (SFI), USAID engaged the private sector to expand access to HIV care and mobilize private financing for HIV in low- and middle-income countries. Methods SFI worked in 11 countries and two regional programs on private sector activities, including technical assistance to financial institutions and private providers on lending to the health sector, facilitating the growth of social enterprise models, enabling private providers to offer additional HIV services, and generating and communicating evidence to host governments to strengthen the policy and regulatory environment for private HIV service delivery. SFI’s impact was estimated through a financial return on investment. Results Over 48,000 clients accessed HIV services in the private sector across three countries, and $6.3 million was mobilized in private loans to the health sector in Tanzania. Additional successes in policy, evidence generation, innovative financing, and service delivery were demonstrated globally. Lessons learned and recommendations SFI demonstrated the feasibility of delivering high-quality HIV services through the private sector and the high demand for those services; the need for evaluation techniques that incorporate patient experience in addition to program costs, benefits, and clinical outcomes; and the need for long-term strategic donor and government coordination around private sector engagement. Conclusions Engaging the private sector in HIV can reduce the burden on public health facilities, provide greater opportunities for access to care, and increase domestic financing for HIV without putting clients into financial hardship.

The predominant focus in research on organizations is on private or public institutions without consistent consideration of their interdependencies. The emphasis in scholarship on private or public interests has strengthened as disciplinary and professional knowledge has deepened: Management scholars, for example, tend to consider the corporation as the unit of analysis, whereas scholars of public policy often analyze governmental, multilateral, community, and nonprofit organizations. This article advocates a partial merging of these research agendas on the grounds that private and public interests cannot be fully understood if they are conceived independently. We review three major areas of activity today in which public and private interests interact in complex ways and maintain that current theories of organization science can be deployed to understand these interactions better. We also suggest that theories of public-private interaction require development and describe a concept called global sustainable value creation, which may be used to identify organizational and institutional configurations and strategies conducive to worldwide, intertemporal efficiency and value creation. We conclude that scholarship on organizations would advance if private-public interactions were evaluated by the criterion of global sustainable value creation, and we identify organizational research opportunities that jointly consider public and private interests.

The UK Biobank Exome Sequencing Consortium (UKB-ESC) is a private–public partnership between the UK Biobank (UKB) and eight biopharmaceutical companies that will complete the sequencing of exomes for all ~500,000 UKB participants. Here, we describe the early results from ~200,000 UKB participants and the features of this project that enabled its success. The biopharmaceutical industry has increasingly used human genetics to improve success in drug discovery. Recognizing the need for large-scale human genetics data, as well as the unique value of the data access and contribution terms of the UKB, the UKB-ESC was formed. As a result, exome data from 200,643 UKB enrollees are now available. These data include ~10 million exonic variants—a rich resource of rare coding variation that is particularly valuable for drug discovery. The UKB-ESC precompetitive collaboration has further strengthened academic and industry ties and has provided teams with an opportunity to interact with and learn from the wider research community. The UK Biobank Exome Sequencing Consortium aims to sequence all the exomes of approximately 500,000 UK Biobank participants. This Perspective describes the results from approximately 200,000 exomes and discusses the lessons learned from this UK Biobank–biopharmaceutical company collaboration.

The sustainable development goals (SDGs) of Transforming our world, the 2030 agenda for sustainable development, and specifically SDG 17, call for cooperation, collaboration and partnership between government, civil society and businesses. To reach the agenda’s objectives, the international community needs to find ways to effectively harness the public and private sectors. The SDGs are integrated and indivisible, with progress in one area dependent upon progress in others. Both the private and public sector are needed to meet the health-related SDG 3, including the target of universal health coverage (UHC) and related goals such as SDG 8 (decent work and economic growth) and SDG 9 (industry, innovation and infrastructure). In the health area, the private sector refers to all non-state actors involved in health: profit and not-for-profit, formal and informal, domestic and international. Almost all countries have mixed health systems, with goods and services provided by the public and private sector, and health consumers requesting these services from both sectors. Therefore, efforts towards UHC cannot ignore the private sector. The private sector’s involvement in health systems is significant in scale and scope and includes the provision of health-related services, medicines and medical products, financial products, training for the health workforce, information technology, infrastructure and support services

Limited time and resources remain to constrain the climate crisis. Natural climate solutions represent promising options to protect, manage and restore natural lands for additional climate mitigation, but they differ in (1) the magnitude and (2) immediacy of mitigation potential, as well as (3) cost-effectiveness and (4) the co-benefits they offer. Counter to an emerging preference for restoration, we use these four criteria to propose a general rule of thumb to protect, manage and then restore lands, but also show how these criteria explain alternative prioritization and portfolio schemes. This hierarchy offers a decision-making framework for public and private sector actors to optimize the effectiveness of natural climate solutions in an environment in which resources are constrained, and time is short.Natural climate solutions, along with reduction in fossil fuel emissions, are critical to mitigating climate change and meeting climate goals. This Perspective outlines a hierarchy for decision-making regarding protecting, managing and then restoring natural systems for climate mitigation.