Trends in Public Spending on Transportation and Water Infrastructure, 1956 to 2004 (PDF; 858 KB)
Source: Congressional Budget Office

The nation’s infrastructure plays a vital role in its economy and in the daily lives of its citizens. Since the mid-1950s, expenditures for transportation and water infrastructure by the federal government and state and local governments have annually accounted for over 2 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP). In 2004, such spending for infrastructure was more than $312 billion (measured in 2006 dollars).

This Congressional Budget Office (CBO) paper describes the trends in public spending for transportation and water infrastructure since 1956. CBO focuses on spending for highways and roads, mass transit, rail, aviation, water transportation, water resources such as the construction and maintenance of dams and levees, and water supply and wastewater treatment. Those types of infrastructure, which draw heavily on federal resources, share the economic characteristics of being relatively capital intensive and producing services under public management that facilitate private economic activity. They are typically the types examined by studies that attempt to calculate the payoff, in terms of benefits to the economy, from government funding of infrastructure.

+ Data (one PDF, two xls)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 4:43 pm and is filed under Government and politics, Infrastructure, Transportation and travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.