Megaprojects: Over Budget, Over Time, Over and Over

President Trump has vowed to create “millions” of jobs building highways, bridges, airports, and other infrastructure, releasing a plan to spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure over the next 10 years. But Trump’s plan to lavish money on infrastructure is not a revolutionary idea — it’s part of a continuous worldwide trend to spend more and more on ever bigger projects. The vast majority of these instances of billion-dollar spending — known as “megaprojects” — ultimately result in a net loss to economies. In fact, as megaprojects expert Bent Flyvbjerg explains in the following article, these grandiose projects operate by an iron law: over budget, over time, over and over again.

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