U.S. Infrastructure and Subsidy Spending: Not What You Might Expect

In my last two posts, I showed that the U.S. has a large social welfare state by cross-national standards, maybe even the second-largest in the OECD. However, the U.S. welfare state is much less redistributive from rich to poor than most other welfare states.

In this post, I tackle spending on infrastructure (“gross fixed capital formation”) and subsidies. According to the punditocracy, the U.S. always needs to spend more on infrastructure. Conversely, the populist mood in this country stands firmly against subsidies to business, and perhaps rightly so — very few subsidies seem rationally designed to compensate for positive externalities.

But it turns out the U.S. spends more than almost every other OECD country on public investment in fixed capital, and less than every other OECD country on subsidies. Take a look:

The first plot shows public investment by country, divided by GDP, in 2012. It includes spending by all levels of government. The U.S. places near the top of the international standings in that year, but this is no fluke: throughout the last three decades, the U.S. has been near the top of international tables in this measure. Maybe everybody needs to spend more on infrastructure, but this certainly doesn’t seem like a uniquely American problem. And maybe you think that a less densely populated country has a higher optimal level of public infrastructure spending, but I’m not so sure: higher infrastructure spending in such a country could subsidize an inefficient distribution of population.

The second plot shows public subsidies by country, divided by GDP, in 2012, again summing up the figures for all levels of government. The U.S. stands right at the bottom, with less than half a percentage point of GDP going to subsidies. Further, state and local governments spend only about 0.1% of GDP on subsidies, so the federal government is the main sinner here. Now, these figures don’t seem to be picking up tax advantages like “tax increment financing” districts popular at the local level. Still, businesses can typically be exempted only from taxes that they otherwise would have paid; expenditure-side subsidies are potentially unlimited.

I should note that federalism doesn’t seem to be the key to U.S. spending patterns here: federal Austria and Switzerland are among the highest subsidy spenders, and are not very high on infrastructure spending.

Bottom line: it’s not clear that, at the margin, the U.S. needs a lot more infrastructure spending, and the subsidy picture certainly complicates any plausible “libertarian populist” movement aimed at big business privileges.