ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the contributions on two fronts: improving the toolkit for forecasting infrastructure and exploring the future of infrastructure and its broader implications. Our goal for Building Global Infrastructure was to create a dynamic, integrated approach for forecasting infrastructure stocks, access, and spending for 183 countries around the world and for a long time horizon. This structure is embedded into the International Futures (IFs) system, with its broad representation of multiple domains, such as economics, demographics, energy, food and agriculture, governance and the environment. The spread of new technologies is facilitating more rapid advance in today's developing countries than high-income countries experienced in earlier periods. The chapter focuses on the cumulative discounted values of GDP per capita and the Human Development Index (HDI). The payback horizon is the time horizon beyond which the cumulative discounted values of GDP per capita or HDI in the Universal Targets Pursuit scenario are consistently higher than those in the Base Case.
