This will be a year of data-driven enlightenment for the infrastructure sector. It is the year where data and analytics matures in the sector; it is the year where evidence-based decision-making starts to become commonplace; it is the year where all organizations begin to uncover new insights that lead to new opportunities and — ultimately — important choices.

Data center investments will continue to grow in Asia Pacific, with investor interest rising in the emerging markets of China, India and Indonesia, according to JLL. With a growing demand for data storage, many companies are looking to rent a share of facilities, rather than own a center. This demand means that Asia Pacific revenue for shared or colocation data centers is expected to overtake the United States, rising to 40 percent of global share by 2020.

BOEING AND ITS FUTURE: One must assume that an aerospace giant such as Boeing will, in time, overcome the damage wrought by its new and problem-plagued 737 MAX airliner. The longer-term question is whether Boeing can keep up with competitors, whether that be Airbus or aviation players in Brazil, Canada and China. The surprising answer that came from Yale alum Bertrand-Marc Allen, who is also president of Boeing International, was this: “A few years ago, it was very easy for everybody in the company to look to our European airplane competitor and our largest U.S defense competitor and see that as our competition. Today, the Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazons of the world are our competitors because they’re entering into disruptive mobility. They are entering into performance-based logistics and machine learning. Those will disrupt supply chains and the management of inventories which are things that we do.”

It has probably been a while since a lot of investors have given REITs a second thought, with tech stocks and other high-growth sectors dominating the market’s attention. In fact, REITs have spent the past several years out of favor, with a strong economy benefiting property values and cash flows, but not so much their share prices.

China has announced plans to become the first nation to create a space-based solar energy farm that beams power to receiving stations on earth. Not only does the plan allow the space-based solar station to avoid cloud cover and other forms of inclement weather, allowing it to collect the sun’s ray 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, it also gathers sunlight that is six-times as intense on earth-based solar farms.

John Rowland, president and co-founder of S²A Modular, is a second-generation homebuilder who moved from site-built homes to factory-built homes after learning the significant advantages of modular indoor construction for homes, as well as commercial structures.

The U.S. economy will continue to support demand for real estate in 2019, reports UBS in its U.S. Real Estate Outlook 2019 report. Even if the pace of growth in real GDP is a little slower than in 2018, the momentum is positive and the labor market is strong. Additional findings from the report include:

The boom of Chinese investment in U.S. commercial real estate, which lasted from 2014–2017, has been largely curtailed by China’s enactment of foreign exchange currency controls. But what are the actual effects of this policy, and what do the Chinese government’s underlying motivations tell us about when we can expect capital controls to end?

Wherever you look around the world, the clamor for increased spending on critical infrastructure has reached an inflection point. In developed markets, aging infrastructures are in need of repair, while many emerging nations and governments are beginning to recognize repairing and constructing infrastructure will help support their pace of economic growth. Changing demographics are also spurring governments to act. The increase in both younger and older people throughout the globe means different types of infrastructure, such as schools and hospitals, are needed for local populations to thrive.

As employers have moved away from the simplicity and security of defined benefit pension plans, employees have taken on more responsibility for retirement through defined contribution programs, like 401(k) plans. With more workers taking a bigger role in their own financial futures, investment managers have sought to make the complicated decisions about asset allocation and risk management a bit simpler.

During 2018, we started to sound a bit like a broken record. We felt the Fed’s dual policy agenda of simultaneous rate hikes and balance-sheet reduction was too aggressive in the context of a global economy bloated with debt and addled far too long by salves of quantitative easing and zero-interest-rate policies. We even questioned whether the Keynesian academics at the Fed fully appreciated the direct and measurable impacts of quantitative tightening on global money supply. All the way through December’s unanimous decision by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to hike fed funds for the fourth time in 2018, our concerns gained very little traction in consensus circles.