Investment in infrastructure could create Boston jobs

Posted on May 6, 2017

An large investment in infrastructure could create more Boston jobs.

A large-scale investment could create 3 million or more jobs over the next five years if planners prioritize projects on the basis of their job creation potential and project criticality.

If planners focus strictly on project criticality, however, they will squander the opportunity, creating as few as 1.6 million new jobs. That’s the key takeaway of a new study by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

The study found that planners must adopt a comprehensive, portfolio approach to investment to capture the full array of benefits from infrastructure spending.

A balanced portfolio would invest heavily in sectors that have high job creation potential (such as seaports, hospitals, and airports) but would include investments in sectors that, though they do not create a large number of jobs, are crucial to the US economy’s competitiveness and productivity.

BCG and CG/LA estimate that a $1 trillion investment in a balanced portfolio would deliver about 3 million direct and indirect jobs (see the exhibit below). That number includes both temporary construction jobs and long-term operations and maintenance employment.

“Currently, policy makers have no way of assessing the impact of infrastructure investment on job creation,” says BCG’s Freedman. “Although advocacy groups and others offer up numbers, there is no scoring system that focuses primarily on job creation.” As a result, the federal government and the states are in the position of making huge investments without being able to fully gauge taxpayers’ return on investment in the form of new jobs.