Mihir Sharma, Columnist

America's Builder-in-Chief Should Beware

Infrastructure spending is no panacea.

January 9, 2017 at 10:00 PM UTC

Mihir Sharma is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, he is author of “Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.”

More than half of China's infrastructure projects may have destroyed wealth.
Photographer: Qilai Shen/Corbis Historical/Getty Images

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Can government investment in infrastructure fuel the sort of dynamism that propels an economy forward? Today, that’s virtually an unquestioned truth. Infrastructure spending is constantly cited as the way forward for a stagnating euro zone; in the U.S., both candidates for president promised billions of it. When Donald J. Trump takes office on Jan. 20, that’s the one aspect of his economic agenda that, it appears, Democrats will be able to get behind.

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