Who Should Pay For Infrastructure? by The most daunting impediment to efficient financing is public misperception by Richard M. Bird and Enid Slack published by CATO Institutte (2018).
Most popular discussion of infrastructure spending amounts to little more than a plea for someone else to pay the bills. Although there are some reasons for higher-level governments to provide some local infrastructure projects, in the end the bill must be paid either by user charges or by taxing someone. In such cases, it is preferable for users to pay whenever that is feasible. But governments seldom do this, instead relying on taxes. In this article, we draw heavily on our recent book, Financing Infrastructure: Who Should Pay (McGill-Queens University Press, 2017), to discuss why users should pay, why they seldom do, and how we may do better on this in the future.
