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International development has moved beyond charity. Gone are the days when the United States would just spend its seemingly bottomless largess to help less fortunate or vanquished countries, as it did after World War II. International development has reached a new, globally competitive stage, bringing with it enormous strategic and economic implications for the United States in the years ahead.

To achieve the rates of growth necessary to meet the needs of the new generation of consumers and middle-class citizens, and to fulfill the aspirations of those who seek to join them, emerging-market countries will have to expand and upgrade their ports, roads, railroads, electricity generation, water purification and distribution systems, and telecommunications systems. Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has admitted as much by committing more than $50 billion to infrastructure improvements by 2021 to sustain Colombia’s recent GDP growth. India’s government has acknowledged that it must increase its total infrastructure spending to more than ten percent of GDP by 2017 to maintain its growth-rate targets.

So far, the United States has failed to become a significant player in international infrastructure development. In 2012, the two dozen or so U.S. construction and engineering companies that compete in the field captured barely 14 percent of the revenues earned by international companies outside their home markets. Government officials from Colombia to Indonesia complain that representatives of Brazilian, Chinese, South Korean, and European companies constantly visit and tout their credentials but that months can go by without anyone from a U.S. company coming to their doorsteps. According to International Construction magazine, the construction and engineering company Bechtel was the only U.S. contractor ranked in the world’s top ten construction companies by overall revenue in 2011. That year, French, German, Italian, and Spanish firms accounted for more than half of the overseas revenue generated by international contractors, and European companies represented seven of the top ten transportation developers worldwide, as meas­ured by the number of projects they had under construction or in operation. Chinese firms, meanwhile, may be newcomers, but they are growing fast. Although Chinese contractors’ total market share outside China, according to Engineering News-Record, was only 13.8 percent in 2011, the three biggest construction companies by total revenue in both 2010 and 2011 were Chinese. And all three of those entities are state-owned.

American companies face numerous hurdles and impediments — many of them self-imposed — that have left them lagging in this increasingly critical sector. To start with, U.S. firms have been less focused on international markets than their European competitors, which have a longer track record building infrastructure in the developing world. Despite the United States’ geographic proximity and close ties to Latin America and the Caribbean, for example, in 2011, Spanish companies alone received 32 percent of the revenues generated by international contractors in that region. Experience designing and implementing projects in Asia enabled European companies to grab nearly $50 billion in contracts in that region in 2011 — twice as much as the Chinese did in their own neighborhood. Although U.S. companies sometimes point out that their counterparts can operate free from the constraints of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a U.S. federal law that forbids the bribery of foreign officials, most of the world’s leading infrastructure firms abide by equivalent domestic legislation and hail from countries that have signed the OECD’s Anti-Bribery Convention.