Megaprojects had long been out of fashion. During the two decades before the 2008 economic crisis, many governments shifted away from enormous rail, electrical and city-building initiatives and generally stuck to local, incremental things: no more CN Towers and high-speed rail lines. Western foreign-aid spending shifted away from dams and superhighways and focused on digging wells, handing out mosquito nets and inoculating children – pointillist initiatives that avoided the corruption, overspending and ambiguous economic outcomes of big-brush projects, but also avoided confronting serious infrastructure shortfalls, such as Asia’s dependency on coal or Africa’s lack of goods-shipping highways.
Read Full Article »
