OECD on Hungary’s Rail Infrastructure Development

Due to several recent events, the state of the Hungarian railways has once again come to the forefront of public interest, so it is worth examining the issue from an international perspective, the financial portal portfolio.hu writes.

The OECD has statistics on investment in the segment and the main infrastructure indicators for a number of countries, which can be used to get an idea of trends over the past decades. It is important to stress, however, that the statistics cannot show how efficiently resources have been used, so they cannot tell us the real state of rail tracks, trains and stations, or the quality of service, the portal notes.

According to the OECD, Hungary is among the EU Member States that spend more on rail infrastructure development as a percentage of GDP. The country has ranked in the top third of the field in all but five years since the turn of the millennium until 2021 (the last year for which data is available). Hungary spent 0.4% of its GDP on rail infrastructure in 2021, compared with slightly above 0.3% for the 19 EU Member States with available data (the 27 Member States that make up the European Union today are included in the comparison below, with 13 of them, including Hungary, not yet members of the Community in 2000, the base year).

In terms of per capita investment in rail infrastructure, Hungary ranked 9th in the EU in 2021 (USD 64.6 per capita/year), up significantly from 17th in 2000 (USD 33.7 per capita/year), and substantially close to the EU average.

The share of rail infrastructure investment in total domestic transport infrastructure investment is also typical for the treatment of railways. In this respect, Hungary ranked 12th in the EU in 2021 with a share of 25.4%, compared to 6th in 2000 with 52.7%. However, the intermediate years show a wide variation in this respect: there were years when the ratio was above 75%, although there were also examples of ratios below 10%. In terms of total investment in inland transport infrastructure, Hungary ranked 8th in the EU in 2021 (USD 254.2 per capita/year), compared to 20th in 2000 (USD 63.9 per capita/year), the portal’s analysis shows.