Abstract
This chapter explores the role of the Big Four accountancy and the World Bank in honing “infrastructure” into a tool for furthering capital accumulation. Public–Private Partnerships (much promoted by the Big Four) are critical to this agenda, since they ensure guaranteed high rates of profit. Firms such as KPMG have also been active in facilitating mega infrastructure corridor plans and advising companies on the opportunities they offer for increasing profits. The corridors envisage the wholesale re-engineering of economic geographies to enable capital to benefit from the free flow of goods and the agglomeration of cheap labor along corridor routes. Labor relations are being fundamentally transformed as supply chains are increasingly subjected to the disciplining “logic of logistics.”
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Notes
- 1.
An expression used to convey unusually long periods of gestation and of pay off.
- 2.
Such PPP contracts take various forms: some involve the construction and operation of new infrastructure, others the provision of services from existing facilities; in some, the ownership of the underlying asset is ultimately transferred to the private sector operator, in others it remains with the state.
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Hildyard, N. (2021). “Infrastructure” and the Big 4: Public–Private Partnerships, Corridors, and the Expansion of Capital. In: Hurl, C., Vogelpohl, A. (eds) Professional Service Firms and Politics in a Global Era. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72128-2_10
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