My intuition is that there wouldn’t be much of a replacement effect, unless you consider different groups being more likely to do megaprojects because they are more successful a replacement effect.
I expect this for a few reasons. First, megaprojects are usually organized according to a specific need, and I would be surprised if a given stakeholder (like a city or a corporation) had a meaningful backlog. Second, the current amount of spending is an accident; I think this a different case to one where they spent much less than they originally planned. Lastly most of this is debt spending, and I feel like organizations don’t go looking for ways to absorb all of their available credit.
It does occur to me that the debt point probably weighs against EA value, because that effectively means the savings are amortized over the length of the financing, and because the same amount won’t necessarily be spent elsewhere it isn’t a direct benefit to anyone.
My intuition is that there wouldn’t be much of a replacement effect, unless you consider different groups being more likely to do megaprojects because they are more successful a replacement effect.
I expect this for a few reasons. First, megaprojects are usually organized according to a specific need, and I would be surprised if a given stakeholder (like a city or a corporation) had a meaningful backlog. Second, the current amount of spending is an accident; I think this a different case to one where they spent much less than they originally planned. Lastly most of this is debt spending, and I feel like organizations don’t go looking for ways to absorb all of their available credit.
It does occur to me that the debt point probably weighs against EA value, because that effectively means the savings are amortized over the length of the financing, and because the same amount won’t necessarily be spent elsewhere it isn’t a direct benefit to anyone.