Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy

by Adam Tooze

In 2018, after first proposing to cancel funding for U.S. development finance altogether, the Trump administration threw its weight behind the Better Utilization of Investments Leading to Development Act (or BUILD Act), a bipartisan bill that established the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC).61 Subsuming America’s existing Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the new finance corporation raised the amount that could be put at risk in support of development lending from $29 billion to $60 billion and extended the terms on which the United States could provide support to include risk-bearing equity.62 In the summer of 2018, the U.S., Japan, and Australia announced plans to jointly support infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific region.63 To back that up, in 2019 Australia launched its Infrastructure Financing Facility for the Pacific with a capital of $2 billion.64 Together, the United States, Japan, and Australia underwrote the so-called Blue Dot Network to certify infrastructure projects. The aim was to transform the estimated $94 trillion in global infrastructure investments that were so urgently needed in the developing world into “an asset class underpinned by standard contracts,” in the manner of commercial real estate projects in the developed world.65