That's how much China's Guangdong province has budgeted to encourage some 2000 manufacturing companies to replace humans with robots, using subsidies and tax incentives to encourage the transition. That according to a story this week on the ABC news web site. Many other provinces are setting up similar programs, often under the banner of "Man for Machines." Almost unbelievably, Guangzhou, the provincial capital of Guangdong, aims to have 80% of manufacturing there automated by 2020. Perhaps contrary to the perceptions of most, not only are rising wages a factor in the Chinese move to robots, as well as improving product quality, but also high levels of turnover and factory workers shortages. "Frontline workers, their turnover rate is really high. More and people are unwilling to do repetitive jobs. So these two issues put the manufacturing industry in China under huge pressure," ABC quotes one Chinese manufacturer as saying.

That was the position of the US in terms of logistics infrastructure quality, according to a 2014 report from World Economic Forum, as highlighted last week in a new report on the subject of infrastructure from the Business Roundtable, a high powered collection of CEOs from many of the country's largest companies. That ranking, putting the US behind countries such as Japan and many European nations, is not nearly good enough, the Roundtable says, endangering US competitiveness and future prosperity. The US needs much higher levels of infrastructure spending, the report says - though fails to spell out how that can best be achieved, the key question. We'll note the biannual logistics competitive index from the World Bank placed the US as a much higher number 5 in terms of infrastructure in 2014.