Aotearoa New Zealand suffers from an infrastructure deficit. Without the key infrastructure needed for the economy to thrive, future generations are being deprived of significant economic prosperity. 

While transformational infrastructure projects need time to be developed into sound technical solutions, many New Zealand projects are being further delayed by policy decisions and financing constraints. 

The authors apply the infrastructure Wider Economic Benefits approach to quantify the cost to society of further delays, by using the example of the Waikato Expressway to estimate its downstream benefits. 

The analysis quantifies the annual benefits of having the Expressway in the economy. If the expressway is not functioning as early as possible, $334 million of economic benefits are forgone each year.