> subsidies from higher levels of governments (e.g., federal) to lower levels (e.g., cities) for infrastructure
The same thing is happening right now with EU grant money given for "development" to some of its Eastern European members. Lots of mayors and local officials use that money for grand local infrastructure projects for which they won't have any reasonable money to maintain even in the near future (let alone 30 to 50 years from now), because we have a numerically declining tax-base that is getting older and older (I live in one of those Eastern European countries).
But mentioning that issue gets you labeled as a person "against progress" or an anti-European (or worse, a Russian shill who doesn't trust the European project). We have a saying in Romanian that roughly translates as: "you should stretch out only as much as your blanket allows you to", i.e. one should only consume the resources he/she thinks are reasonably available to him/her, but right at this moment we are "stretching out" further than the bed itself and getting out of the bedroom altogether.
My wife is Estonian and she would disagree with you strongly.
How your government allocated the funds was your governments doing, but the money that was sent to Estonia has been invested and that’s what it has been... an investment.
Any investment that does not yield returns that cover its costs is failed.
Infrastructure facilitates so much of what makes up society that -not- having it can be much more costly than having it.
But in those cases it doesn’t it’s because government corruption or ineptitude has eaten you from the inside.
All I'm saying is that for the next few decades all the roads being built now with EU money will need to be maintained, and that will cost money, money that won't come from the EU anymore but will need to be provided locally, presumably from taxes.
Yes, that national or regional road that was modernised or enlarged using European money will most probably prove to be an worthy investment and money will be found to keep it in shape, but what about all the secondary roads or even smaller inner-village streets that have now been modernised and which will not bring any extra economic value whatsoever? Because using a gravel-road to connect 5 or 10 village houses is as as good as any asphalt-road, and, more importantly, is a lot cheaper to maintain in the long run. And when asphalt roads go bad they go really bad, with craters instead of the actual road, I've not witnessed the same phenomenon with gravel roads (they do get sort of bad but not on the same magnitude).
Where are you living in Romania that minor village roads get paved? I have a lot of cycling around Transylvania adding road-surface data for OpenStreetMap, and I have found that usually only the village’s main thoroughfare gets paved while the side streets remain unpaved.
Still, even the paving of village ways may have positive economic value. Throughout Cluj county one finds that once asphalt is laid in a village, that village becomes an attractive place to buy a home for commuters who are now priced out of Cluj itself.
Lots of villages in Teleorman, this part of Constanta county [1] (an area which is really, really beautiful), or, across the Danube, in villages like this one [2], just as the Baragan plain ends. I have a personal side-project where I'm photographing old village mills and posting those photos online [3], and as such I've visited lots of villages in Southern and Southern-Eastern Romania (plus a few in Southern Transylvania).
One could argue that roads have a lot less value in Europe than in the US, where trains just have to go much longer distance and have very little ability to get to even second stage towns, whereas in Europe the towns are more dense and better served by rail.
Honestly, I claim no expertise here at all, just my experiences driving around Northern Europe have informed this idea that there are far fewer suburbs and sprawl. Maybe it’s not at all close to reality
Romania’s rail infrastructure is notoriously outdated, and journeys across the country are often faster by road (bus or your own car) than even the “express” trains.
"Twenty EU-financed airports in Estonia, Greece, Italy, Poland and Spain have misspent large sums of EU taxpayers' money for well over a decade. A report out Tuesday (16 December) by the European Court of Auditors found that €255 million - more than half of the EU funds audited - went into unnecessary expansion projects."
People who actually measure EU ROI usually report extremely high levels of failed investment. In fact EU spending is notoriously corrupt and famous for yielding negative ROI. Here's some stories about Cornwall, one of the poorest parts of the UK and one of the poorer regions in the EU.
EU "invested" 465 million pounds to create jobs. It was meant to create 10,000 new jobs for a cost of £46,500 per job, but actually only created 3,557 jobs. "You've got some absolutely damning statistics, for example in the research and development fund, the cost per job was £160,000 per person."
It would literally have been a better use of money to pay people an average wage to do nothing whatsoever - UBI for real. Instead it was spent on things they called "investments" that would never have worked if you'd pitched them to a bank and tried to get a normal loan.
And he suggested that there had been a lack of analysis of whether individual programmes had achieved what they set out to do. He said that the impact of schemes was “rarely considered” and said that there was little attempt to explain how EU funding would provide a financial benefit and no consideration of “how are we going to turn 10million into 60m”. Mr Parkins said that while most organisations would have to demonstrate that there would be “more money coming out than they are putting in” that had been lacking with the EU funding.
He also claims a lot of the funds go to public sector agencies or NGOs that are optimised for receiving grant funding.
The auditors reported 22 cases of suspected fraud to OLAF, the EU’s fraud investigators. They included suspected conflicts of interest and “the artificial creation of conditions to receive subsidy” .... In Greece, an EU-funded sewerage network project has remained unused nearly a decade after it was launched after the local government failed to connect it to private homes.
To be fair, in many cases the point of building the infrastructure is not to have the infrastructure in the end, but rather to give that EU money to the ruling elite.
Routing it through a company that pours a bunch of concrete is just the cost of keeping Brussels off your back and thus keeping the tap open.
Yes, for example, it is much harder to rebuild a bridge in the middle of a city than it was to build anew. Maybe that bridge was constructed in the open field and now the area around is built up. There are a lot of traffic and it should go somewhere while the bridge is closed. A lot of communication lines could go through this bridge and you have to account for it, plan for it and somehow move it while you’re rebuilding the bridge.
Can you just leave it as it is? I’m not sure, it’s a Soviet-build bridge, lots of cement was stolen during construction and now some pieces of concrete are raining down.
This exact problem happened in Montréal with the Champlain bridge, cheaply built in the 60s. A new bridge had to be built at the same place (inaugurated last year) and connected to existing infrastructure.
It seems counterintuitive to conclude "we can't afford to build this bridge in the first place, because it would be too expensive to temporarily close it". But based on your sibling's post, maybe you're right?
Often economies run on star cities, and if your country's economy is disconnected from those star cities because of a breakup, your country's economy will also suffer.
There was also the entire communist central planning thing that made resources misallocated.
What kind of logic is that? I'm not trying to defend the USSR here, just understand how infrastructure spending works. But if that's how you conduct your reasoning, wouldn't you also believe that Abraham Lincoln must have been wrong about everything, seeing as how things ended for him?
The Roman Empire isn't around either, but I don't blame their infrastructure projects for that. More likely that those helped them last as long as they did.
The USSR collapsed because it overspend on pointless projects. Bridges to nowhere or military bases in Afghanistan add nothing for the economy. Just because it's infrastructure doesn't mean it's good.
So this seems like a roundabout way of answering the GGP's (my) question by saying that the post-Soviet countries are only declining to pay for maintaining those bridges that happen to go nowhere, which is presumably fine, because nobody needs them. The Soviet-era bridges that do see frequent use, they can afford to maintain/rebuild just fine? Are you answering this from an epistemic position of particular knowledge and experience about Eastern European economics and infrastructure, or are you just speculating that this is the way it probably is, based on your opinions of how the world works?
When I did industrial stuff I dealt a lot with engineers and techs that were happy doing maintenance. That's probably not something Vonnegut as a writer had any experience with.
Engineers and technicians are a minority group. Your positive experience of that group doesn't necessarily invalidate Vonnegut's observation about people in general.
All post-Communist nations tend to struggle with the idea of diligent upkeep / maintenance of publicly owned things. In fact, I would say that visibly older, but well maintained infrastructure is a great indicator of good governance.
The attitude is slowly getting better, but aging of our countries will probably exacerbate the problem again. It is not just disappearing tax-base, but disappearing skill-base that comes with the common job market. Like, finding a competent tradesman is visibly becoming harder. Why should they even stay in the country when they can earn more in Germany or the UK.
+1 to upkeep/maintenance, this really is what separates developed countries from developing, not just in Europe but anywhere in the world. Any third-world country can build a shiny new showpiece airport, the real test is what it looks like 10 or 20 years down the line.
That said, if finding a competent tradesman is becoming harder (demand exceeds supply), their income will eventually increase to an equilibrium point where it starts making sense for them not to move to Germany/UK.
Sometimes all it takes is for people like you to make this issue heard by all before it is understand and appreciated. There are many competing issues taking attention.
Without these funds the infrastructure would either be poor or non-existent, making it expensive or unrealistic to move goods and people around within a country like Poland.
When I emigrated to Poland in 2005 (from the US) driving between Krakow and Gdynia at never more than 15% over the speed limit of 90 km/h (the average speed everyone else is travelling at) (but often under 90 km/h due to many lorries on the road, tractors, accidents, people in elderly Fiats, elderly people in Peugeots/Fiats/Polonez/etc) with three 15 minute stops the driving time was about 10.5 to 11 hours. Now it's about 7 to 7.5 hours (two stops, not three, and usually driving right at the speed limit).
The change is because of the introduction of the proper A1 motorway. Two lanes each direction and, most places, rated for 140 km/h.
I should note that the "proper" A1 isn't yet complete. There's no A-class motorway between Krakow and Czestochowa though it's being built and should be complete in a few years.
Maintenance on the thousands of kilometers of motorways (and highways and smaller roads) will undoubtedly be a significant expense in the future. But those roads allow for a staggering quantity of goods (and people) to be moved about quickly, safely, and inexpensively (even accounting for tolls). I doubt that our current government is setting aside money for maintenance for all of that but the potential incompetence of today's government shouldn't be a reason not to do something that will have ripple effects for decades.
One of my thoughts is building infrastructure is a speculative bet. You hope that it generates enough economic benefit to pay for it's construction, maintenance, and eventual replacement. A thought is sometimes that bet fails. You end up with infrastructure that doesn't generate enough revenue to pay for it's maintenance or eventual replacement.
I feel like post war the US made a lot of extravagant speculative bets on infrastructure, particularly related to suburban housing development.
The same thing is happening right now with EU grant money given for "development" to some of its Eastern European members. Lots of mayors and local officials use that money for grand local infrastructure projects for which they won't have any reasonable money to maintain even in the near future (let alone 30 to 50 years from now), because we have a numerically declining tax-base that is getting older and older (I live in one of those Eastern European countries).
But mentioning that issue gets you labeled as a person "against progress" or an anti-European (or worse, a Russian shill who doesn't trust the European project). We have a saying in Romanian that roughly translates as: "you should stretch out only as much as your blanket allows you to", i.e. one should only consume the resources he/she thinks are reasonably available to him/her, but right at this moment we are "stretching out" further than the bed itself and getting out of the bedroom altogether.