Companies prefer to put money in the pockets of shareholders or to hoard cash rather than to raise wages or invest.

With a Trump administration we don't know enough yet to make predictions, but if past behavior is any indication, I am not encouraged.

While infrastructure is of course important, it must be part of a bigger vision. The point is not to simply dig ditches but to steer those investments towards transformational growth.

Too many politicians seem to reach for 'infrastructure' as the default answer to investment, as if roads and bridges were the answer to everything. Even the IMF and the World Bank seem to mainly offer infrastructure spending as an alternative to austerity, although they are right to focus on the need for investment.

Unfortunately, simplistic framing of problems leads to simplistic answers.

As a businessman, Donald Trump has been associated with some of the worst excesses of a particular style of value-extracting and asset stripping capitalism: set up businesses, let them fail, avoid paying suppliers, use bankruptcy laws to avoid taxes for decades, then set up another business somewhere else. It is this model that is the cause of many problems we see today.

Germany is using its Energiewende policy as a way of envisioning a green transformation and innovation across many sectors.