“We are competing with China and other countries to win the 21st century,” Biden said. “We are at a great turning point in history.”
How does America’s infrastructure compare to infrastructure in other countries?
The rankings often cited by the White House come from a 2019 report by the World Economic Forum, a Swiss nonprofit, that sought to compare the competitiveness of the economies of 141 countries, assigning scores based on measures of dozens of factors such as the quality of government institutions. Labor markets, health care and infrastructure.
Overall, the United States ranked second behind Singapore, but lags somewhat behind when it comes to transportation infrastructure and utilities.
Regarding transportation, the forum’s result took into account eight metrics, ranking the United States 12th globally. Half of the measures are designed to be objective, while the other half are based on a survey of business leaders. The United States ranked first in two scores: road and airport connectivity, which measures how easily people move between different parts of the country.
But the United States lags behind in rail rankings: The forum measured the number of miles of rail lines per square mile in each state, and ranked the country 48th.
The country’s population is much more spread out than many other rich countries, such as those in Europe, and Roberto Crotti, one of the report’s lead authors, said any measure would have drawbacks when trying to compare disparate economies.
But Crotty said European leaders have invested much more in their rail networks than the United States, viewing them as a way to provide low-emission, medium-distance travel. Biden’s plan calls for a massive expansion of federal support for railways, and proposes an investment of $80 billion.
The forum’s findings do not take into account some of the factors that Biden’s plan was designed to address, such as transportation service or safety.
Regarding water and electricity utility infrastructure, the United States ranks No. 23 in the forum’s results. But almost every rich country scored close to the maximum number of points, and Crotty said the measures – which include access to safe drinking water and reliability of the electrical grid – are more important for developing countries.
While the United States ranks alongside wealthy European and Asian countries, the forum has been issuing the report since the 1970s, and Crotty said the country’s infrastructure scores have declined somewhat in recent years. He said there were “indications that quality has not kept up with the expectations of the business community.”
“Given what the facts say and what we can observe in terms of trends, it makes sense to use this number to say that the United States is not as good as it used to be,” Crotty said. “This is supported by facts.”
In future editions of the report, Crotty said the United States could look worse when the forum includes measures for environmental sustainability. In a separate study, some of Crotty’s colleagues ranked the state No. 24 when it comes to transitioning to renewable energy — another major focus of Biden’s plan.
But what about China, the country the Biden administration has singled out as America’s most important global competitor? The forum ranked its infrastructure 36th, behind Malaysia and above Greece. (Hong Kong is in third place).
China is investing heavily in catch-up efforts, spending about 5.6% of its GDP on transportation infrastructure investments in 2018, according to the OECD, an intergovernmental economic group based in France.
In the United States, the equivalent figure was only half a percent, lower than many other developed countries. But because the American economy is so large, in dollar terms, spending in the country is among the highest, especially when it comes to roads.
Such comparisons can also be difficult. The United States is an advanced economy with well-established infrastructure, while China is growing rapidly but remains much poorer.
“Even ignoring issues of governance and how projects are selected, it is a mature industrial economy versus an industrial economy,” Mark Scribner, a transportation analyst at the libertarian Reason Foundation, said in a Twitter message. “China is focusing on greenfield areas while the US’s main needs are to rehabilitate/rebuild existing legacy infrastructure.”
