Comment by thefourthchime
Comment by thefourthchime 6 hours ago
Yes, but on the other side of the coin is the pending maintenance for all of these projects. You don't just build a road, rail or bridge anad then be done with it. They all require upkeep. If the project itself was a jobs program masquerading as a infra, they'll just let all these fabulous projects rot as it won't make sense to keep them up.
TBH potential future problem, scales to whether/how much construction industry get captured to point where maintenance costs is onerous. Developed west forgets, upkeep doesn't have to be expensive to defer which snowballs costs. The broader consideration for PRC is they are per capita, infrastructure POOR, i.e. less unit of infra in variety of categories per capita - there simply isn't that much excess infra relative to population.
Some of the bad investments won't pay back, will get abandoned with demographic change (baked in lower utilization when population drops), but IMO infra serves 10s millions, cuts millions of barrels of oil imports has good chance of paying for itself. Like 2hour -> 2minute infra for 2B rmb = 0.1% of Guizhou GDP. Seems like a no brainer.