Jason Roth on Government Infrastructure Priorities and COVID-19

Jason Roth comments in Lexpert Special Edition: Infrastructure 2020. He says while governments’ biggest priority is to ensure economic activity continues and is a source of growth, “I’d love to see them go in interesting new directions. I think the risk of always thinking only of shovel-ready projects is missing out [on] all the value chain of a project. There’s a huge amount of professional services, legal engineering, planning, regulatory, that’s really a key part of a project. It’s not just construction contractors getting paid to build things. There’s a whole bunch of other work that’s related to those and keeps people busy.”

Jason also comments on the benefits of having many of the large projects, which take between $100 million and $200 million worth of engineering, get up and running. Then, when a pandemic arises, the projects are at a stage at which they can move quickly.