I think in the US is the environmental regulations and other similar approvals and higher labor costs.
In terms of environmental regulations, much time and money is spend researching and mitigating damage to every little critter and vegetation. That bare field you are building over could be home to some rare field cricket and you have to find a new home for them. In some other countries they just bulldoze over that field and be done with it. I got a little experience on this working for an engineering company fresh out of college. They had to write reams of reports documenting what they found in some former military bases before cleanup. From my understanding nobody ever read those documents... they just read summaries.
I have a college buddy who works for the state transportation department in the engineering design division and he tells me all the red tape he has to go through in expanding a highway. They find a couple of native american artifacts during a dig and suddenly things are halted while that is being investigated. When they widened a highway, some people in adjacent houses started complaining even though the highway existed before those houses were build and space was set aside for future expansion. He ended up adding noise barriers to placate them. Then you have nimbys who will fight and further development.
We use highly skilled union workers for public projects in the US while India and likely China use low cost day laborers. They get paid quite low wages.
In terms of environmental regulations, much time and money is spend researching and mitigating damage to every little critter and vegetation. That bare field you are building over could be home to some rare field cricket and you have to find a new home for them. In some other countries they just bulldoze over that field and be done with it. I got a little experience on this working for an engineering company fresh out of college. They had to write reams of reports documenting what they found in some former military bases before cleanup. From my understanding nobody ever read those documents... they just read summaries.
I have a college buddy who works for the state transportation department in the engineering design division and he tells me all the red tape he has to go through in expanding a highway. They find a couple of native american artifacts during a dig and suddenly things are halted while that is being investigated. When they widened a highway, some people in adjacent houses started complaining even though the highway existed before those houses were build and space was set aside for future expansion. He ended up adding noise barriers to placate them. Then you have nimbys who will fight and further development.
We use highly skilled union workers for public projects in the US while India and likely China use low cost day laborers. They get paid quite low wages.