This is one is from that same report. The blue line is transportation expenditure in New Zealand, you can see from 1965 and this 1987 recession, it was a little bit of a downward decline coming out of that.
There was a dip there but it’s come up but that line across is being pretty steady, okay.
And again, I’ve got some examples coming up where we’re going to ask you what the results of these are. This is around infrastructure waves.
Now for New Zealand, 1945 and guess what in that period there, no or least expenditure. What’s going on there? Anybody tell me, for New Zealand in 1940 to 45?
World War II, thank you whoever said that.
So when you’re busy fighting a global war, you don’t tend to be spending heaps of money on infrastructure. You’d spend all your money on armaments or weapons and things like that.
After World War II, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and the US, all had booms of infrastructure construction through to about the mid-1970s.
So people came back, said right we’re going to build our countries, and you had the post-World War II baby boom.
Lots of babies getting born. Lots of men that had been demobilized by the war that you needed to give work.
Oh, that’s a good thing, we’ll build lots of infrastructures, and so you have this peak. And that’s piped utility infrastructure there, okay that peak there.
And then we have a big drop off in the recession. And in this peak, again it’s been water treatment, water, and wastewater treatment plant infrastructure build-out.
Do we have any Koreans in the room? Koreans?
Okay here’s the example of Korea, the same thing happened in Korea. They had the Korean War that finished in the mid-1950s.
And then in the late 1950s, in the early 1960s and 70s, the whole of South Korea have been fought out backward and forwards three or four times.
And they had a whole heap of people who are unemployed and a country that was devastated by war, and the America and everybody else chucking money in to restore.
So what did they do? They employed all those people in Korea to build out infrastructure.
And so they had a period from about 1960 to the mid-1970s where they build a massive amount of infrastructure – the labor was really cheap.
I’m going to do a fast forward on this one, for us, on the thing in a minute but you build a concrete road just got a 50-year life in 1960 or maybe it got a 60-year life and you build out half of your country’s infrastructure in a 10-year period.
What’s happening to Korea in the next decade and a half? They’ve got a massive amount of road.
Now I think China after World War II, there’s a lot of devastation – there would have been a lot of infrastructure building in China and the period maybe 1950, is that right?
It would have been roads, buildings rebuilt and yes. So the same thing in Europe.
So Poland particularly and Germany and bits of France but certainly Germany and Poland, and bits of Russia, same thing. World War II, lots of destruction of infrastructure and buildings, rebuild it.
You would have to say for Syria, given another ten years when they stop killing each other, whole cities have been devastated.
They rebuild England in the UK, Coventry, and bits of London. There had been lots of destruction as part of the war. They got rebuilt.
There was an open question whether they should rebuild Coventry because they made a mess of it and it’s considered the most boring city in the UK, I think now or something but anyway, they did that…
The thing is when you’re looking for strategies, this diagram here, so you had the war for New Zealand, we then have a period of relative wealth following the war.
Lots of infrastructure builds. So you tend to get waves of infrastructure build either following big natural disasters or big war events. Those sorts of events.
And you tend to build most of the infrastructure during periods of national wealth.
So you get these infrastructure construction waves coming through and then when you need to replace some, you have replacement waves.
China in the last decade and a half, or certainly two decades has had a period of quite high national prosperity.
They’ve been building massive amounts of infrastructure.
In that period, they’ve built out the equivalent of the American interstate system in about 10 to 15 years in terms of lane kilometers.
But China has been relatively wealthy during that period in terms of lots of money coming in and stuff like that.
So you have rebuilding periods after national disasters or wars and you have also building periods during periods of national prosperity that lead you to…
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