Going Off the Rails? Obstacles to Public Infrastructure Investment in Advanced Capitalist Economies

Robin Hetzel

The climate crisis, rising geopolitical tensions, and ongoing digitalization processes require a drastic increase in public investment, which also retains a crucial role in crowding-in private investment. However, despite this urgent need for more investment, public infrastructure is crumbling in most advanced capitalist democracies as they struggle to adequately increase public investment. This project focuses on infrastructure investment policies in the US and Germany and will explore three hitherto neglected obstacles to higher levels of public investment. First, it will reconstruct the multilevel dynamics of crucial economic actors in the respective growth models and their preferences on public investment policies in fiscal federal countries. Second, the project will trace the complexity of economic ideas about public investment in the public discourse as an ideational obstacle. Third, it will test whether popular support for public investment is an obstacle or can be shaped by economic and political actors. The results will provide important explanations of the growing difficulty for advanced economies to generate the infrastructural resources necessary for their economies and society to function.