AIIB shows bigger public-sector role needed in providing infrastructure

FIRST proposed back in October 2013, the China-sponsored Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) has rocketed into international attention of late, making headlines almost daily. But the debate has become a chiefly political one.

Yet what matters most, surely, is not only whether China has upstaged the US-led Bretton Woods family of multilateral financial institutions by boldly pushing ahead with a new development bank, and in so doing challenged the postwar economic order. What the debate arguably s…