[joe_the_user]

My broad impression is that in the EU and the US, a given project is a "meal" that all the interests involved will take a cut out of.

But in the EU or elsewhere, the "cut" the interests will take is just financial, the project will be designed for cost-efficiency by competent architects and engineers and it's just that the different interests will be paid off with money to make things happen.

In the US, the spread-out state and administrative structure results in a situation where each interest gets it's cut through its ability to make some small change or demand some particular process. A lot of this involves a lot of adversarial relations, some of them intended to stop corruption but which actually result inefficiency and corruption (complex bidding processes legal repercussions for failure to adhere to bid etc. etc.).

California spending $3 billion planning ("planning") a high speed rail system is good example. A lot of that involved buying land whose value had inflated.