Paul Rosenstein-Rodan
Course
He started as an Austrian economist, and ended up believing in "The Big Push." I'm still waiting for the biography.
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My favorite example of the white elephant problem are the ghost cities in China. Cities built for millions of people an no one lives there. And there are several of these cities. The video on this site is particularly interesting. http://www.theblaze.com/stories/amazing-video-emerges-of-chinas-ghost-ci...
Could we consider the airports without passengers in Spain as an example of the white elephant?
I think so Jose. A white elephant is an object, scheme, business venture, facility, etc., considered to be without use or value, so not only the airports, Spain is full of examples all along the country, especially after the financial crisis... Olympics Stadium without use (Seville), Financial Centers (Saragossa), industrial areas, splendid empty museums and other buildings and so on.
One criticism you don't raise is that very little of the official aid, the main source of government investment, gets through to the point where it could lead to development. Corruption in developing countries is matched by management fees and expert honoraria in donor institutions. Yet corruption is mentioned much more often than aid drain. Does PRR give examples of where the big push has occurred? Singapore, Taiwan, israel and South Korea are not models we can use to make the point.
Japan had and has a big problem with this, too. Back when its economy started to tank in the early 1990s, the government started spending tons of money on infrastructure projects, mostly outside of the big cities because it generated jobs for key constituencies of the Liberal Democratic Party. As a result, you get absurdities like towns with three suspension bridges to the same island (an island with only a few hundred inhabitants).