Infrastructure

The plumbing of the economy. Roads, railways, airports and container ports are all vital for an economy’s operation. But they take up a lot of land and can have negative externalities, such as noise. Democracies can thus struggle to build infrastructure as quickly as autocracies such as China, which faces no democratic constraints (see article). Some infrastructure is built privately but roads, in particular, suffer from the free rider problem and tend to be built by the public sector. For more, see this article.