Category Archives: infrastructure

Don’t Fund Infrastructure Projects Separately

Barack Obama wants to spend tens and possibly hundreds of billions of dollars on new infrastructure projects. It’s lucky that the government can borrow money for free, right? After all, whenever the government takes on obligations which are funded through … Continue reading

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Annals of Legislative Incompetence, Pennsylvania Edition

It’s not just federal legislators who are good at screwing up carefully-negotiated deals. Pennsylvania’s governor, Ed Rendell, faced with a $1.7 billion transportation funding shortfall, came up with a very bright idea: selling off a concession to run the Pennsylvania … Continue reading

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Why Infrastructure Privatization is Moving Slowly

Jenny Anderson has an evenhanded overview of US infrastructure privatization today. In a nutshell: it’s necessary, but it’s going to happen very slowly. The good news is that the media is moving away from "OMG the government is selling off … Continue reading

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Privatizing Parking

Kit Roane reckons it’ll be a long time before we see any significant infrastructure privatization in New York State: If Paterson wanted to turn the New York State Thruway over to private operators, he’d first have to pilot a bill … Continue reading

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The Cheap Pennsylvania Turnpike

What kind of effect has the credit crunch had on the formerly-frothy market for infrastructure investments? As money becomes scarcer, the price tags attached to future-cashflow investments like toll roads would normally go down. But there was always another possibility: … Continue reading

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Why Infrastructure isn’t a Bubble

Kit Roane has a weirdly bearish piece on infrastructure investment today, looking at it from the point of view of pension funds and bemoaning the fact that they can no longer get predictably high returns on any deal they like. … Continue reading

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The Downside of Road Tolling

Peter Swan and Michael Belzer don’t think much of toll-road privatization. If you hike road tolls to maximize profits, they say, then you end up with a large number of trucks taking second-best routes – something which is inefficient, unpleasant, … Continue reading

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Obstacles to Infrastructure Privatizations

Is infrastructure privatization more problematic than other debt-financed buyouts? Not really.
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In Praise of Infrastructure Privatization

The government gets more money than the asset is worth, and gets to spend it on the public; meanwhile, the private-sector is burdened with the liabilities for the next 100 years.
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