And the US Transportation and Water Infrastructure Spend, if we go back, this is a long-run data set from the Economist again.
You can see that big lot of capital invested not like 1960 through to 1970, operations and maintenance as a percentage of GDP has been pretty steady but just dropping off lately. The Capital was, at the height was 3% GDP, it’s now down to about 1% for both of those.
In 1960, 3% of GDP was capital, 2% was operations and maintenance, 5% of total GDP was spent on infrastructure. 2007, 1% of GDP capital for the US, 1.4% operations and maintenance, so 2.4% of GDP. Admittedly the US economy is a lot bigger now than it was but relatively, a lot less money is getting spent.
McKinsey estimated that rich countries infrastructure spend was about 2.5% GDP total. And that should be around about 3.5% GDP.
So, if we took the 2014 US infrastructure spend of 416 billion equaling 2.25% GDP. We take the 2015 GDP of 18.5 trillion, 1% of that would be an extra 185 billion expenditure, which is equivalent to 44% more than current expenditure.
So, that gives you just some really round figures about the size of the gap. And Canada would be based on the 1.6 trillion GDP, 1% would be 16 billion extra. Lots of money to spend on infrastructure.
There’s a very good Congressional budget office report in 2014 that’s available on the internet if you want to look and dig into this for the US.
That was the figure there; 2014 of which highway, building highways is 165 billion; mass transport, 65; aviation, 36; and water was 109 billion utilities. So, this gives you a handle on the spread of the spend.
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