The development of three new infrastructure sectors in a hierarchical market economy

To make the most of emergent techno-economic innovations, countries around the world must constantly upgrade their physical infrastructure and infrastructure systems – more than ever now that the world is facing growing environmental constraints. Public policies that foster the transformation of established infrastructure sectors, and encourage the development of new ones, can help to speed up and direct these structural changes. But to be effective, these policies must take into account how the process of development of new sectors varies among different infrastructure sectors, how it varies with respect to other kinds of sector, and how it varies in different institutional contexts. In this work, I show how three new infrastructure sectors developed in Chile, a ‘Hierarchical Market Economy’ characterised by the dominance of diversified business groups and subsidiaries of multinational enterprises, a segmented labour market, and a low-skills equilibrium. These three sectors are the ones that first started to build wind farms, solar PV systems, and anaerobic digesters in the country, and in the study I characterize three aspects of their development process: a) the economic changes that turned these new (to the country) kinds of infrastructure facilities into attractive entrepreneurial opportunities; b) the economic agents that discovered these opportunities and developed them into viable investment projects, and those that sponsored and procured finance to build these projects; and c) the means by which these economic agents became capable of undertaking the relatively novel activities that their entrepreneurial initiative demanded. The resulting rich description of new sectoral development processes in Hierarchical Market Economies helps to understand what makes these processes vary inter-sectorally, cross-sectorally, and cross-nationally.