Investment in infrastructure is part of the capital accumulation required for economic development and may have an impact on socioeconomic measures of welfare. The causality of infrastructure and economic growth has always been in debate. In developing nations, expansions in electric grids, roadways, and railways show marked growth in economic development. However, the relationship does not remain in advanced nations who witness more and more lower rates of return on such infrastructure investments. Nevertheless, infrastructure yields indirect benefits through the supply chain, land values, small business growth, consumer sales, and social benefits of community development and access to opportunity. The American Society of Civil Engineers cite the many transformative projects that have shaped the growth of the United States including the Transcontinental Railroad that connected major cities from the Atlantic to Pacific coast; the Panama Canal that revolutionized shipment in connected the two oceans in the Western hemisphere; the Interstate Highway System that spawned the mobility of the masses; and still others that include the Hoover Dam, Trans-Alaskan pipeline, and many bridges (the Golden Gate, Brooklyn, and San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge).[37] All these efforts are testimony to the infrastructure and economic development correlation. European and Asian development economists have also argued that the existence of modern rail infrastructure is a significant indicator of a country’s economic advancement: this perspective is illustrated notably through the Basic Rail Transportation Infrastructure Index (known as BRTI Index) During the Great Depression of the 1930s, many governments undertook public works projects in order to create jobs and stimulate the economy. The economist John Maynard Keynes provided a theoretical justification for this policy in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,[39] published in 1936. Following the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, some again proposed investing in infrastructure as a means of stimulating the economy (see the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009). While infrastructure development may initially be damaging to the natural environment, justifying the need to assess environmental impacts, it may contribute in mitigating the "perfect storm" of environmental and energy sustainability, particularly in the role transportation plays in modern society.[40] Offshore wind power in England and Denmark may cause issues to local ecosystems but are incubators to clean energy technology for the surrounding regions. Ethanol production may overuse available farmland in Brazil but have propelled the country to energy independence. High-speed rail may cause noise and wide swathes of rights-of-way through countrysides and urban communities but have helped China, Spain, France, Germany, Japan, and other nations deal with concurrent issues of economic competitiveness, climate change, energy use, and built environment sustainability. Research into packet switching started in the early 1960s. The ARPANET in particular led to the development of protocols for internetworking, where multiple separate networks could be joined together into a network of networks The first two nodes of what would become the ARPANET were interconnected on 29 October 1969.[58] Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) developed the Computer Science Network (CSNET). In 1982, the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) was standardized and the concept of a world-wide network of fully interconnected TCP/IP networks called the Internet was introduced. TCP/IP network access expanded again in 1986 when the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) provided access to supercomputer sites in the United States from research and education organizations.[59] Commercial internet service providers (ISPs) began to emerge in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. The Internet was commercialized in 1995 when NSFNET was decommissioned, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic.[60] The Internet started a rapid expansion to Europe and Australia in the mid to late 1980s[61][62] and to Asia in the late 1980s and early 1990s.[63] During the late 1990s, it was estimated that traffic on the public Internet grew by 100 percent per year, while the mean annual growth in the number of Internet users was thought to be between 20% and 50%.[64] As of 31 March 2011, the estimated total number of Internet users was 2.095 billion (30.2% of world population). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure

• published: 21 Nov 2014
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