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A nation's basic system of transportation, communication, building and maintaining road, bridge, sewage, and electrical systems provides millions of jobs nationwide. For developing countries, building an infrastructure is a first step in economic development. It is needed for a country to be efficient and productive. Without a good infrastructure in a country, an economy cannot thrive. Businesses cannot grow and be competitive with similar firms elsewhere.
KPMG recently released a report called "The Infrastructure 100," which displays the most exciting infrastructure projects from around the world, as selected by independent judging panels due to their scale, complexity, innovation and impact on society. This is a showcase of the most interesting infrastructure projects from around the world. There are different categories from water, power, renewable energy, rail, roads and education among others.
They address major social concerns in a bold manner, despite huge engineering challenges. The Venice flood barrier project, for example, is one of the biggest public works projects in Italian history and will use compressed air to raise flood gates to protect Venice from flooding. In the U.S., the Green Power Express is a proposed 3,000 mile network designed to transmit 12,000MW of renewable energy and thus address the transmission issue which is currently the biggest bottleneck facing the development of clean energy. On the other side of the world, the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge has been designed with a service life of 120 years and can withstand the impact of an earthquake measuring eight on the Richter Scale. One of the country’s most technically complicated engineering projects, this requires the creation of several artificial islands and will reduce the travelling times from Hong Kong to Zhuhai from 4.5 hours to about 40 minutes.
The Incheon tidal power plant will facilitate 44 water turbines and will be five times bigger than the world’s current biggest tidal plant once it is completed. In a country like South Korea, which lacks an abundance of natural resources, this represents an ambitious but necessary project and could be a landmark for tidal power. Overall there is a huge social and economic impact brought about by these projects, We need such essential investments in the services that we daily rely on to foster global economic growth.
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