The Harms of Infrastructure Privatization: A Step Backward in Progressive Policymaking
JULY 26, 2021
By Joseph Stiglitz
This week, the White House and congressional negotiators are working to hammer out a bipartisan infrastructure framework—one component of the Biden administration’s laser focus on upgrading crumbling infrastructure and making essential, long-overdue public investments that would be of enormous benefit to the country.
As always, however, the devil is in the details.
Specifically, the bipartisan framework lists several items as “proposed financing sources for new investment,” including public-private partnerships (P3s) and asset recycling. These proposals should be a cause for concern.
In many cases, such measures are back doors to privatization—with public funds paying for projects controlled by unaccountable private firms whose primary motive is to increase their own profits.
These kinds of proposals represent a misguided reversion to a neoliberal framework that has, for decades, widened economic inequality, prioritized extractive corporate power over people, and hollowed out our public capacity.
https://rooseveltinstitute.org/2021/07/26/the-harms-of-infrastructure-privatization-a-step-backward-in-progressive-policymaking/
Brief Biography of Joseph E. Stiglitz
Joseph E. Stiglitz is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University. He is also the co-chair of the High-Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress at the OECD, and the Chief Economist of the Roosevelt Institute. A recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979), he is a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank and a former member and chairman of the (US president's) Council of Economic Advisers. In 2000, Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, a think tank on international development based at Columbia University. He has been a member of the Columbia faculty since 2001 and received that university's highest academic rank (university professor) in 2003. In 2011 Stiglitz was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Known for his pioneering work on asymmetric information, Stiglitz's work focuses on income distribution, risk, corporate governance, public policy, macroeconomics and globalization. He is the author of numerous books, and several bestsellers. His most recent titles are People, Power, and Profits, Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy, Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited, The Euro and Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy.
https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/jstiglitz/bio
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