Sustainable infrastructure investment with labor-only production

The purpose of this paper is to consider a partial equilibrium model for a sustainable infrastructure investment in a labor-production economy. We consider an inter-temporal Stackelberg game in a “capital primitive” economy where all capital investments are made by a Central Agency (a government). The government is assumed to have a number of objectives including sustainability of the infrastructure investments, while firms are assumed to be myopic, maximizing only current profits and paying taxes as a function of their returns. Both open-loop and closed-loop (feedback) Stackelberg strategies are considered. Based on the analysis of the investment game, some conclusions are drawn regarding the propensity to invest as a function of sustainability constraints, the taxation rates and employment levels. We then show that investments can tend to a constant level and thus strategic government goals of sustainability and employment growth can be planned only if labor costs and the general price index are steady or characterized by a set of conditions ensuring the attainability of the steady-state investment.