2026/05/11 by JAMES FOWLER, Kevin D. Tennent, Andrew R. Smith +1 · 1 voice
Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #Political and Economic history of UK and US #Public-Private Partnership Projects #Transport and Economic Policies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/eso.2026.10118
openalex publication_date 2026/05/11 · openalex created_date 2026/05/12 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/11
This paper explores the historical development of management thought around the cost of public infrastructure. We argue that swings between ex post pricing and ex ante discounting as temporal frameworks within which the public, managers, politicians, and the media appraised major transport infrastructure projects constitute a dominant but unrecognized narrative. We use London in the twentieth century as a case study, identifying major changes in the 1920s and again in the 1960s which decisively rebalanced how projects were evaluated. We conclude that the current cost-benefit and ex ante discounting framework arose out of the adoption of American concepts and processes from the early 1960s onward. We think that this approach fostered rent-seeking activity and principal-agent problems, but that the empirical costs and timeframes for completing transport infrastructure have changed much less than is commonly believed in over a century.