#infrastructurespending

These strategies ensure that key players remain pivotal in shaping the future of the US construction landscape.

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Robust demand recovery amid gradual supply increase is expected to push base metal prices higher on a year-on-year basis in 2021. However, increasing environmental concerns and emission targets are likely to lift the global cost curves across metals. "Geo-political relations and currency movements are also likely to be the key drivers for metal prices," India Ratings and Research (Ind-Ra) said in a report. "The current strong global commodity demand is stemming from a continued strong Chinese demand while other economies are also making a comeback from the pandemic-related impacts." Notably, China which has a lion's share of global consumption of key commodities is likely to witness a strong demand over 2021 on back of a continued government-led infrastructure spending. "The global commodity demand improvement will be balanced by gradual capacity additions, although intermittent lockdowns in certain producing nations would cause temporary disruptions." "Also, sustainability and decarbonisation efforts are likely to lead to capacity curtailments." In addition, it said that logistical and supply chain management remains an issue and also supports cost inflation. "However, the tight demand-supply equation in 1H21 is likely to ease in 2H21." --IANS rv/sn/skp/(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Read the full article

"We’ve seen in the 2009 stimulus the problems inherent in spending money on infrastructure, particularly through the federal government. The federal government has layers of reviews and approvals that are great employment generators for environmental consultants, but add an average four years to the timeline of a project, all in the project development stage. They waste resources on project review, not on project execution. Very few people on either the right or the left really understand this. Most on the left think that the work on the infrastructure is done by deserving poor people, more of whom could be employed if only we added money. That is far from the case. Most of the workforce is highly skilled. [..] We lack "why are we doing this project" standards, measurable outcomes. We may know and set pavement duration standards, but we lack performance standards that say that travel durations between points should not exceed X at peak morning traffic. We have those measurable performance standards for water supply and waste water. (Flint fell short of these standards.) We don’t for transportation. [..] Performance standards that linked road and transportation capacity and land-use decisions would say “there are projects that cannot be done until we have a clear view of where the project will draw its workers and customers, and what we need to do to see that their journey time meets an acceptable standard.” [..] There has to be a national discussion on the road performance standards that we want to control land-use decisions. Those standards will then allow us to examine the existing transportation networks, and to identify the projects that will get us to that standard in a fixed time (10 or 20 years). Then, having adopted a plan and had it tested in court, we can move to execution much more quickly than we can now. Private developers who confront environmental reviews generally spend time on their first project learning the process and what the regulators want for their kind of project, whether it is wetlands remediation or parking access. [..] The difficulty with most transportation projects is that they are viewed as one-offs, which must be reviewed very carefully, generally by people who are focused on the environmental impacts, and not on the value of the transportation improvement. Having performance standards for the system helps establish the value of that improvement. [..] if we had better standards for transportation projects, we'd not only get better overall performance out of our infrastructure, but we'd be able to build it quicker[..], since the key environmental reviews will occur around the master plan, not the project."