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Japan was the first non-Western country to accomplish successful industrialization, and the dominant perception of its ‘industrial policy’ had over-emphasized specific characteristics of Japan. However, from the perspective of today's development thinking, Japan's economic history shared a wide range of common factors in usual economic development: macroeconomic stability, human resource development, and economic infrastructure. Industrial policy in Japan sometimes worked well and sometimes did not, depending on how effectively it counteracted market failure and took advantage of market dynamism. We must note, however, that the external conditions faced by Japan were widely different from what today's developing countries face.

For investors, ‘infrastructure’ is now an ‘asset class’, the boundaries of which are limited only by the ability of finance to build new contracted income streams that extract wealth from funding, constructing and operating infrastructure facilities. What started off with investments in so-called economic infrastructure (utilities, roads, ports, airports) now include investments in resource/commodity infrastructure (oil and gas facilities, mining, forests), social infrastructure (hospitals, public housing, schools, prisons, law courts, military bases), information infrastructure (big data harvesting) and, still in its infancy, natural infrastructure (payments for so-called environmental services). This Chapter looks at the many new investment vehicles – from private equity infrastructure funds to venture capital funds – that are being used to profit from infrastructure, and attempts to quantify the amount of money now being extracted. The trajectory is not only towards increased inequality: it is also profoundly undemocratic, elitist and unstable. Undemocratic because a handful of fund managers now increasingly determine what gets financed and what does not. Elitist because the facilities that would most benefit the poor do not get built. And unstable because infrastructure-as-asset class is a bubble that is set to burst.

This chapter examines the role of China’s economic infrastructure: that is, transportation, telecommunications, utilities, and power supply. As well as providing some background to the concepts of ‘infrastructure’ and ‘economic infrastructure’, the chapter looks in some detail at China’s infrastructure provision; infrastructure spending policy; the economic impact of infrastructure spending; and challenges for the future.

Public expenditure plays an important role in growth through contribution to physical and social infrastructure. The analysis of state level expenditures in this chapter shows that there has been a sharp increase in the growth of spending on social and economic services in the states during the recent high-growth phase. Many of the poorer states have increased the social expenditures not only relative to their own past but also relative to richer states. This has been accomplished through increased revenues from own sources as a result of faster growth and higher tax devolution from the center as a result of faster growth in richer states. The process has created a virtuous circle: economic growth has led to larger fiscal space and faster improvement in social and economic infrastructure promises to contribute to higher growth.

Donald Trump and Trumpism are less the cause of the current crisis in the American system than a symptom and accelerant of underlying trends. This chapter examines the continuities and differences between Trump foreign policy and that of his predecessors. It demonstrates that Trump is, in fact, unusual in the scope and scale of his dismissal of multilateralism, ability to raise doubts about American alliance commitments, and rejection of liberal internationalism. These policies magnify the longer-term tendency of the United States to adopt policies that undermine its geopolitical position, such as fiscally irresponsible tax cuts, underinvestment in domestic infrastructure and human capital, democratic backsliding, and overreliance on military instruments. In short, even if Trump had never been elected the United States would still face the erosion of its leadership from inevitable shifts in relative power, and still be failing to pursue domestic policies that might mitigate those shifts.

In this chapter the critical question as to what to target is taken up by Muir Fairchild in two lectures, “National Economic Structure” and “New York Industrial Area.” Targeting a relatively small number of vital and vulnerable economic nodes of an industrialized nation would produce economic and social paralysis, thereby quickly draining the enemy population of the will and means to resist. By contrast, the direct bombing of civilians is not only unethical and diplomatically costly, it is also less effective than attacking a nation’s economic infrastructure. The attack of economic targets will exert pressure on the ability of the population both to sustain itself and to produce the weapons, munitions. and supplies required to wage war.

This chapter addresses the migration of Jewish peddlers. Immigrant peddlers played a significant role in the establishment of regional, national, and local Jewish economic infrastructures and the spread of wares. Millions of Jews have migrated over time to foreign lands, driven by urbanization and industrialization, racially inflected nationalism, and a growth in the Jewish population.

After the Constitution provided a stable and accommodative government at the national level during 1790, most of the interactions between political and economic development took place at the level of the states. The chapter explains that it was difficult politically for the federal government to maintain a presence in banking or to play much of a role in the development of the nation's economic infrastructure; for example, improvements in internal transportation. Dividends and other revenues states obtained from investment in banks and corporations as well as toll revenues on state-owned canals would be greater if there had not been so many banks, corporations, and canals. Within a stable framework of national government, many states rewrote their own constitutions to disentangle their governments from banks and corporations, and to provide more open access to both by enacting free banking and general incorporation laws.

This chapter focuses on Cooperative Extension, an institution of repair created during the twentieth century to bring U.S. agriculture into industrial agriculture. Debates on whether U.S. agriculture should follow the industrialization of farming or the agrarian ideal of small independent farms are presented. Instead of resolving issues for U.S. agriculture, Cooperative Extension created an institutional identity crisis for farm advisors. The chapter discusses the introduction of the Cooperative Extension to California. Despite the introduction of Cooperative Extension, farm advisors were not able to solve the problems the growers were facing because they had little experience with niche crops. The role of farm advisors in promoting farming practices that helped to create industrial agricultural’s technological and economic infrastructure is presented.

This chapter considers the so-called economic infrastructure of the emerging telematic society by using a social model, namely, that of Platonic utopia, slightly adjusted. According to Plato, we are beings who have fallen from heaven (topos uranikos) into the world of appearances (phainomena). At home in heaven, we saw eternal and durable ideas in their logical order. Falling into the world, we were engulfed in the river of forgetting (Lethe), and its waters washed away all memory of the Ideas. We have forgotten them. So we come into the world as beings without ideas (idiots), and we can live out an entire idiotic life in the world, turning in circles. This self-motivated idiotic life follows the order of a kitchen (oikonomia), and Plato also calls it zoon oikonomikon: the economic life. In utopia, three forms of life exist: economy, politics, and philosophy. In the social model, the key word is leisure, and its opposite, business. In a telematic society, everyone lives at leisure and where all work (economy) and all effects (politics) become subhuman.