Hunting white elephants on the road. A practical procedure to detect harmful projects of transport infrastructure

The white elephant concept is used to qualify public investments representing a severe misallocation of society's resources or expenditures that can be deemed to reduce the wellbeing of its future members. In the transport sector, white elephants (WEs) are particularly relevant due to the vast amount of resources involved in large-scale infrastructure projects and to their long lifecycle. In most articles on the subject, WEs are major projects showing a certain political or even economic short-term appeal but that are essentially inefficient. In this paper, the definition includes, beyond those that are inefficient, projects that are financially unsustainable and/or very unfair to future generations when properly analysed over their project lifecycle. An early identification as WEs of those efficient projects from the socioeconomic point of view that are bound to entice the failure of a main stakeholder or are unfair to future generations, facilitates reconsidering their financial structuring in order to make them acceptable and avoid the WE label.