Session 4: Zachary Liscow - Getting Infrastructure Built
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Presentation from 2025 Conference on Accelerating Infrastructure Permitting. For further information please see www.oecd.org/gov
Session 4: Zachary Liscow - Getting Infrastructure Built
- 1. Getting Infrastructure Built: The Law and Economics of Permitting Professor Zachary Liscow Yale University 1
- 3. We aren’t building electricity nearly fast enough for the green transition 3
- 4. Average spending per kilometer on urban transit, across countries 4
- 5. Average spending per mile to build new US interstate highways, construction wages, and materials prices, over time Average cost per mile 1958−1963: $8.5 million (2016 dollars) 5 Liscow & Brooks (2023)
- 6. US highways are by far the most expensive ever built in the world 6
- 7. Urban renewal in New Haven 7
- 8. Environmental impact statement preparation time 8
- 9. Average page lengths of environmental impact statements 9 1703 414 0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2013-2017 1977-1978 Years
- 10. Litigation • Median litigation when lawsuit succeeds: 2.5 years • Median litigation even when the lawsuit fails: 18 months 10
- 11. Cross-Country Measures of Litigation 11
- 13. Total Gas Pipeline Mileage in the US 13
- 14. Two Dimensions of Permitting Regimes 14
- 15. What to Do: Power to Decide 1. Shift legal power away from project opponents 2. Facilitate popular decision-making or negotiations 3. Allow more tailoring of the rules 4. Selective centralization 15
- 16. What to Do: Capacity to Plan 1. Streamlined processes 2. Improved and standardized public participation 3. More planning staff and better data 16
- 17. Benefits and Costs of Permitting • Benefits (harder to measure): • Procedural • Environmental • Distributional (Brinkman and Lin 2024) • Costs • Sometimes slower and more expensive construction: lower productivity • Less transportation infrastructure (longer commute times, worse matching to jobs, higher costs of moving goods, maybe fewer working hours) • Less electrical infrastructure (more expensive—and probably more carbon- intensive—electricity) • Less mining, etc. 17
- 18. A final note: Poorly implemented federalism 18
- 19. Sometimes too little centralization 19
- 20. Sometimes too much centralized involvement: Saugatuck River railroad bridge 20
- 21. Poorly implemented “marble-cake” federalism • Federal funding creates bad incentives: • Pile everything into projects you can get funded • Can’t pay for planning staff with federal funds, so they do a bad job planning • No federal data system to systematically track costs of federally funded transportation projects 21