Chapter XLV: Állami Beruházások (State Investments)

Overview

Chapter XLV is the central government’s direct capital-investment account: the line through which the state itself — rather than a ministry, a sectoral agency, or an EU operational programme — builds. The 2026 envelope is 486,328.4 millió Ft of expenditure against zero own-revenue, a fully tax- and debt-financed chapter. Two domains account for almost all of it: building investment (magasépítés — ministry buildings, the Buda Castle quarter, individual state construction projects) at roughly 110.6 milliárd Ft, and transport investment (közlekedés — roads and rail) at roughly 362.2 milliárd Ft. A residual covers project preparation and a small utilities-and-waste investment line.

The chapter is unusual within the budget because it does not finance a function — it finances assets. That distinction sets the analytical question. The classical-liberal frame does not treat capital expenditure as automatically more legitimate than current expenditure; the test is whether the project accumulates capital that will service real future demand, or whether it redirects saving from market-selected projects to politically-selected ones and consumes it under an investment label. A road that carries freight the economy actually generates is capital. A reconstructed palace quarter is consumption with a long depreciation schedule. The chapter contains both, and the classification has to separate them line by line.

A structural point applies before any single line. The entire chapter is the central state acting as its own developer, contractor-selector, and price-setter. There is no consumer plebiscite anywhere in it: the projects are not financed by the people who will use them paying for use, and the benchmark for “value” inside the chapter is “did the funds get spent against the project schedule,” not “was the output worth what it cost.” The information that would tell a market developer whether a given road segment, building, or rail upgrade is worth its capital cost — the price users would voluntarily pay, the rents a private investor could capture, the competing projects foregone — is absent by construction. This does not mean every line is waste. It means the chapter cannot, from its own data, demonstrate that any line is not. The classifications below work from the underlying function each project serves.

Expenditure Analysis

Kiemelt útberuházások (Priority Road Investments)

• Current allocation: 219,495.3 millió Ft

• Classification: Keep

• Rationale: This is the largest single line in the chapter and finances the trunk-road and motorway network — the physical infrastructure on which the freight and commuter movement of the whole economy depends. Roads of this class sit close to a genuine rights-and-rule-of-law-adjacent function: a usable national road network is a precondition for the division of labour to operate across the territory at all, and the network has strong network-economic characteristics that make fragmentary private provision genuinely difficult. The honest classification is Keep — but Keep with two sharp qualifications, because “keep the function” is not the same as “keep the financing architecture unexamined.”

  First, road infrastructure is one of the few state-built assets that can be financed substantially from use. A motorway carries identifiable vehicles; the matricaes (vignette) system already prices access; tolling by segment and by axle-weight is technically routine across Europe. Where a road segment can be funded from the tolls its own users pay, the case for financing it from general SZJA and ÁFA revenue — paid by citizens who may never drive it — weakens. The line should be reviewed for the share of capacity that user-charging could carry directly, with general revenue confined to the genuinely network-precondition segments and the regionally-redistributive ones.

  Second, the chapter gives no project-level breakdown. “Kiemelt útberuházások” is a single 219.5 milliárd Ft number covering an unnamed set of segments. A reader cannot tell from the budget whether the money funds the M4 eastward extension carrying real Budapest–Debrecen freight or a low-traffic prestige segment serving a politically-favoured district. The 2026 budget law itself provides that investments financed from this line are to be accounted on separate project-by-project centrally-managed budget lines and that the finance minister may reallocate appropriations between individual investments¹ — the project detail exists administratively but is not surfaced for scrutiny in the chapter. The Keep classification is conditional on that project-level detail being published, because without it the line cannot demonstrate that its capital is going to roads the economy needs rather than to the highest-yielding political project.

• Transition mechanism: Retain the line. Mandate publication of the project-by-project allocation already required administratively by the budget law, so each segment’s capital cost is visible. Commission a segment-by-segment review of toll-financing potential; migrate high-traffic inter-urban segments toward user-charge financing and ring-fence general revenue for the network-precondition and regional-cohesion segments that cannot self-fund.

• Affected groups: Road users (who would, on toll-funded segments, pay directly for use rather than through general tax); the construction sector and its concentrated set of large contractors; taxpayers in general, who currently fund the entire line regardless of whether they use the roads.

Gyorsforgalmi úthálózat fejlesztése (Expressway Network Development)

• Current allocation: 102,962.0 millió Ft

• Classification: Keep

• Rationale: The expressway-network line funds new motorway and expressway construction — the M-road programme. The function is the same as the priority-road line and carries the same network-economic characteristics; the classification is the same Keep, with the same two qualifications. New expressway capacity is the part of the road programme where user-charge financing is most available: a greenfield motorway segment is the textbook case of an asset whose users are identifiable, whose access is excludable by toll gantry, and whose construction can in principle be financed against the toll stream it will generate. Several European motorway networks are built and operated on exactly that basis.

  The line also illustrates a mechanism the budget does not surface. When the state builds expressway capacity from general revenue and then charges only a flat annual vignette, it has set the price of road use administratively rather than letting it carry information. The flat vignette charges the same to the low-mileage rural driver and the high-mileage daily commuter; it sends no signal about which segments are congested, which are underused, or where the next increment of capacity is actually worth its capital cost. A distance-and-segment toll would let the network’s own usage data reveal where expansion pays — replacing the current arrangement, in which the decision of which expressway to build next is made administratively, with no market test, by the same body that builds it.

• Transition mechanism: Retain the line for the network-precondition function. For new greenfield expressway segments specifically, require a toll-financing assessment as a condition of project approval; where the projected toll stream covers a material share of capital cost, finance that share from the toll stream (directly or via availability-payment concession) rather than from general revenue. Move the matrica system toward distance-and-segment pricing over a defined period so the network generates the usage information that should drive expansion decisions.

• Affected groups: Future road users; the construction sector; general taxpayers, who currently carry the full capital cost of expressway expansion they may not use.

Térségi jelentőségű közúti beruházások (Regionally Significant Road Investments)

• Current allocation: 33,058.0 millió Ft
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: This line funds regional and lower-order road investment — connections of regional rather than national-trunk significance. The function is legitimate within the frame: regional road access is part of the same network-precondition logic, and these are precisely the segments least able to self-fund from tolls because their traffic volumes are lower. The honest classification is Keep. The one structural observation: regional road investment is the part of the chapter where the subsidiarity question is sharpest. The decision of which regional road in which county is worth its capital cost depends on local information — settlement patterns, local freight flows, where the economically active population actually needs to move — that a central investment account in Budapest does not hold. The line is correctly a Keep, but the decision of which regional projects it funds belongs closer to the county and municipal level than the chapter’s centralised structure places it.
• Transition mechanism: Retain. Where the legal and fiscal architecture allows, devolve project-selection within the regional road envelope to county-level decision-making, with the central line functioning as a block allocation rather than a project-by-project central choice.
• Affected groups: Regional road users and the regional economies served; county and municipal governments, who would gain project-selection authority under devolution; taxpayers.

Egyedi magasépítési beruházások (Individual Building Investments)

• Current allocation: 74,586.0 millió Ft

• Classification: Phase-Out (3 years)

• Rationale: This line funds the central government’s individual state-building construction projects — ministry buildings, public administration premises, and individually-scheduled state construction. The 2026 budget law treats these as project-by-project centrally-managed lines, the same architecture as the road programme¹. The classification question turns on what the buildings are for. Premises that house genuine rights-protection and constitutional-precondition functions — courts, the offices through which the legislature and the rule-of-law apparatus operate — are legitimate state assets, and the construction needed to provide them is a legitimate, if reviewable, capital line. But a 74.6 milliárd Ft annual line for “individual building investments,” undifferentiated in the chapter, finances a programme that has in recent years been dominated by the relocation of ministries and public bodies into reconstructed prestige premises rather than by replacement of genuinely unfit working accommodation.

  The mechanism here is the one the chapter’s structure hides best. A ministry already occupies functional premises. Rebuilding it into a more prestigious building in a more prestigious location does not accumulate productive capital — the administrative function is unchanged, the headcount is unchanged, the public service delivered is unchanged. It is consumption: the state has redirected saving from whatever the taxpayer or a market investor would have done with it into a building whose additional value over the adequate existing premises is the prestige itself. The visible result is a handsome reconstructed building; the unseen is the productive capital formation — the private plant, the housing, the equipment — that the same 74.6 milliárd Ft would have financed had it not been taxed away. For a worker at Hungary’s median monthly gross wage — approximately 540,000 Ft according to KSH’s most recently published kereseti (earnings) data² — this single line represents on the order of 19,000–20,000 Ft a year in tax — a meaningful sum, directed at upgrading the offices of an administration whose work does not change because the offices changed.

  This does not condemn every project inside the line. Genuine replacement of unsafe or functionally obsolete premises for constitutional-precondition bodies is defensible. But the line as a whole, at this scale and with this composition, does not pass the capital test, and the honest classification is a Phase-Out: wind the general “individual building investment” programme down to a defensible residual confined to genuine replacement need.

• Transition mechanism: Phase-Out over three years using a linear glide, because the protected party here is contractual: construction projects already under contract have counterparties whose contracts must run their course, and abrupt cancellation would strand in-flight commitments and trigger termination liabilities. Year 1 honours all contracts signed before the reform; new project approvals are confined from the outset to genuine rights-protection / constitutional-precondition replacement need, assessed against a published unfit-premises standard. By Year 3 the line settles at a defensible residual — the analysis treats the steady-state residual as small relative to the current envelope, and classifies the line as a phase-out of the discretionary-prestige component. The construction sector loses a politically-allocated revenue stream; it does not lose the genuine replacement work, which continues.

• Affected groups: Construction contractors holding state building contracts (protected through contract run-off); public-administration staff whose office relocations would not proceed; taxpayers, who would retain roughly 19,000–20,000 Ft per median earner per year of the financing currently absorbed by the line.

Budavári ingatlanberuházások (Buda Castle Property Investments)

• Current allocation: 20,000.0 millió Ft

• Classification: Immediate Cut

• Rationale: This line funds the continuing reconstruction of the Buda Castle quarter — the Nemzeti Hauszmann Program, the long-running programme to rebuild the Budavári Palotanegyed (Buda Castle Palace District). The programme has run since the mid-2010s; its cost was initially estimated at around 200 milliárd Ft, and its total through-life cost has been the subject of sustained public dispute, with independent estimates running well above the original figure and the managing body (Várkapitányság) having declined to publish a consolidated total on national-security grounds³. The 20,000.0 millió Ft in this chapter is the 2026 instalment of that programme.

  No analytical contortion makes this a capital investment in the sense the frame recognises. A reconstructed palace quarter does not service future productive demand; it does not raise the capital stock per worker; it does not enforce a contract, secure a right, or protect against irreversible involuntary harm. It is a discretionary allocation of taxpayer resources to a heritage-and-prestige object chosen by political officeholders. Calling it “investment” because the budget line carries the word beruházás does not change what it is — the asset’s value is judged by no future consumer and tested by no market. It is present consumption of national income, financed involuntarily, for an aesthetic-symbolic return that the people paying for it did not choose to buy.

  The seen is the restored palace quarter — a genuinely handsome result, visible to every visitor. The unseen is what the 20,000.0 millió Ft, and the far larger sums spent in prior years, would have done in the hands of those it was taxed from: the capital deepening that raises real wages, the private investment that the country’s convergence gap most needs, the savings of households who funded a palace instead of their own provision. A heritage object financed by voluntary giving — a foundation, a subscription, ticketed access, philanthropic restoration, the mechanisms by which palaces and cathedrals across Europe are in fact maintained — would reveal the actual demand for it. Financed by compulsion, it reveals only the preference of the officeholders who chose it.

  There is no reliance interest that requires a phased exit of the programme. Contractual reliance attaches to specific signed construction contracts, not to the programme as a discretionary political commitment, and the budget line is a year-by-year political allocation, not a multi-year statutory mandate. The classification is Immediate Cut: the 2026 instalment is not appropriated; specific contracts already signed are honoured through their own contractual terms as a transition cost, but no further programme phases are funded.

• Transition mechanism: Do not appropriate the 20,000.0 millió Ft. Honour construction contracts already legally signed through their existing terms (a one-off transition cost, not an ongoing line). Transfer the completed and in-use portions of the quarter to a self-financing model — ticketed access, venue hire, a heritage foundation able to receive philanthropic and corporate restoration funding — so that any further restoration is financed by those who value it, at the scale at which they value it.

• Affected groups: Construction contractors with signed Castle- quarter contracts (honoured through contract terms); the heritage and tourism sector around the quarter (which gains a self-financing operating model); taxpayers, who cease to fund a discretionary prestige programme through compulsory taxation.

Befejezés előtt álló építési beruházások (Building Investments Nearing Completion)

• Current allocation: 14,000.0 millió Ft

• Classification: Phase-Out (2 years)

• Rationale: This line funds construction projects that are near completion — the final instalments needed to finish state building works already substantially built. The classification logic is distinct from every other building line in the chapter, and it turns on sunk cost and reliance. A project that is 80% or 90% complete represents capital already committed: the saving has already been redirected, the structure already stands, and stopping at near- completion would strand a half-finished asset that yields nothing. Whatever the original merit of approving these projects — and for the prestige projects among them, the frame’s verdict on the approval decision would have been negative — the decision now facing the 2026 budget is not whether to start them but whether to finish what is built. Finishing a near-complete structure so it can be used is the rational completion of a commitment already made; abandoning it is pure waste.

  This is therefore a Phase-Out, not a Keep and not an Immediate Cut. It is a Phase-Out because the line has no enduring rationale — once the current near-complete stock is finished, there is no recurring function for a “buildings nearing completion” line; it should reach zero. It is not an Immediate Cut because abrupt removal would strand genuinely near-finished assets and breach contracts in their final stage. The horizon is short — two years — because the protected category is finite and discrete: the buildings currently near completion, and no others. Future projects do not enter this line; they would face the frame’s approval test at their own start.

• Transition mechanism: Phase-Out over two years, linear, covering completion of the currently near-finished stock. Year 1 funds the bulk of outstanding completion work; Year 2 funds the residual tail; the line then closes. No new project may be admitted to this line — it is a closing legacy line by construction, not a standing programme.

• Affected groups: Construction contractors on final-stage contracts (honoured to completion); the eventual public users of the completed buildings; taxpayers, who fund a closing finite line rather than an open-ended one.

Állami vasútfejlesztési beruházások (State Railway Development Investments)

• Current allocation: 6,714.7 millió Ft

• Classification: Keep

• Rationale: This line funds state railway-development investment — capital works on the rail network. The function is legitimate within the frame on the same network-precondition logic as the road lines: the rail network’s fixed infrastructure (track, signalling, electrification) has strong network-economic characteristics, and a functioning rail network is part of the physical precondition for the division of labour across the territory. At 6,714.7 millió Ft this is a small line relative to the road programme, and the classification is a straightforward Keep for the infrastructure function.

  One distinction is worth surfacing because it recurs across the transport domain and the budget’s separate SOE chapters. The fixed rail infrastructure — track, signalling — is the genuine network-economic element where shared state provision has a real rationale. Rail operations — running trains, selling tickets, serving passengers — are contestable and need not be a state monopoly; the technical and regulatory feasibility of separating rail operations from infrastructure has been demonstrated in multiple European systems, under both open-access and franchise arrangements. This line funds infrastructure development, which is the part that legitimately sits in a state capital account. The Keep applies to the infrastructure-development function; it carries no implication that the train-operating activity funded in other chapters is equally a Keep.

• Transition mechanism: Retain the line for rail-infrastructure development. As with the road lines, mandate project-level publication so the capital cost of each rail-development project is visible. Keep the infrastructure-vs-operations distinction explicit when this line is read alongside the rail-operator subsidy lines elsewhere in the budget.

• Affected groups: Rail users and the freight economy served by the network; taxpayers; rail-sector contractors.

Beruházások előkészítése (Investment Preparation)

• Current allocation: 10,000.0 millió Ft

• Classification: Keep

• Rationale: This line funds the preparation of future investments — feasibility studies, design, planning, and the technical groundwork that precedes a construction decision. Within the frame this is the most defensible spending in the entire chapter, and the reason is precise. The chapter’s central weakness, surfaced in every line above, is that the state builds without a market test of whether a given project is worth its capital cost. Genuine preparation work — rigorous feasibility analysis, honest cost estimation, demand assessment — is the closest substitute available for that missing test. A well-prepared project pipeline is what allows a road segment to be assessed for toll-financing potential before it is built, a building project to be tested against genuine replacement need, a rail upgrade to be costed honestly. Cutting preparation spending to save 10,000 millió Ft would be a false economy: it would push the chapter toward building on weaker analysis, where the cost of a badly-chosen project dwarfs the preparation saving.

  The Keep is conditional on the preparation work being genuine analysis rather than procedural box-ticking. Preparation that exists only to formally legitimate projects already politically decided delivers none of the value the line should provide. The classification is Keep on the function; the conditionality is that the function must actually be performed.

• Transition mechanism: Retain. Tie the line explicitly to a published project-appraisal standard — cost-benefit assessment, demand analysis, toll- or user-charge-financing assessment for transport projects — so the preparation work performs the market-substitute function that justifies it.

• Affected groups: Engineering and design firms performing preparation work; future budget years, which gain a better-appraised project pipeline; taxpayers, who fund analysis that reduces the risk of capital being committed to badly-chosen projects.

A magasépítési beruházásokhoz kapcsolódó egyéb kiadások (Other Expenditures Related to Building Investments)

• Current allocation: 2,000.0 millió Ft
• Classification: Phase-Out (3 years)
• Rationale: This is the chapter’s only operating-expenditure line (működési kiadás) — every other line is capital (felhalmozási). It funds the operating costs associated with the building-investment programme: administration, ancillary running costs attached to the magasépítés activity. Its classification is derivative of the building-investment lines it supports. The genuine rights-protection / constitutional-precondition replacement construction that survives the phase-out of the individual-building line carries some associated operating cost, so a residual is defensible. But the bulk of this line supports the discretionary building programme being phased out — and an operating line cannot be more legitimate than the capital activity it administers. As the individual-building-investment line winds down and the Castle line closes, the operating overhead attached to them falls with them.
• Transition mechanism: Phase-Out over three years, linear, tracking the wind-down of the building-investment lines it supports. The residual operating cost attaching to genuine replacement construction is retained; the share attaching to the discretionary-prestige programme falls away as that programme is phased out.
• Affected groups: Administrative staff and service providers attached to the building-investment programme; taxpayers.

Egyes közmű és hulladékgazdálkodási beruházások (Certain Utility and Waste-Management Investments)

• Current allocation: 3,512.4 millió Ft

• Classification: Phase-Out (4 years)

• Rationale: This line funds state investment in certain utility and waste-management infrastructure. The classification turns on a distinction the line’s title blurs. Some utility and waste-management activity is genuinely network-economic — the physical pipe-and-grid networks that distribute water or collect waste have last-mile characteristics that resist fragmentary private provision. But utility and waste-management services — generation, treatment, collection operations, retail — are contestable, and across Europe they are routinely provided by regulated private and municipal operators rather than financed from a central state capital account. A central-government investment line for “certain” utility and waste projects, undifferentiated, is most likely topping up capital that should be carried either by the utility operators themselves (recovered through regulated user tariffs, as utility capital normally is) or by the municipalities within whose competence local utility and waste infrastructure sits.

  The mechanism worth naming: when central general revenue funds utility capital that a user tariff could carry, it breaks the link between the cost of the infrastructure and the price the user sees. The user pays a tariff that does not reflect the true capital cost, because part of that cost has been shifted onto the general taxpayer; the tariff stops carrying accurate information about what the service costs to provide. The honest financing model for utility capital is recovery through the regulated tariff paid by users, with the capital decision sitting with the operator and the municipality, not with a central investment account.

  This is a Phase-Out rather than an Immediate Cut because in-flight utility and waste projects have contractual counterparties and serve communities with a genuine reliance on the infrastructure being completed, and because responsibility needs an orderly transfer to the operators and municipalities that should carry it. The four-year horizon allows in-progress projects to complete and the financing responsibility to migrate to the regulated-tariff and municipal model.

• Transition mechanism: Phase-Out over four years, linear. Years 1–4 fund the completion of utility and waste projects already in progress on a declining schedule; over the same period, transfer the financing responsibility for utility and waste-management capital to the regulated utility operators (recovered through user tariffs) and to the municipalities within whose competence the infrastructure sits. The line closes at the end of Year 4; the function continues, carried by the operators and municipalities and financed by the users who benefit.

• Affected groups: Utility and waste-management operators and the municipalities that would assume financing responsibility; utility users, who would see tariffs that reflect true capital cost rather than a tariff partly cross-subsidised by general taxation; contractors on in-flight projects (honoured through completion); taxpayers.

Revenue Items

Chapter XLV records zero own-revenue. The budget tables show 0.0 millió Ft in both the operating-revenue (működési bevétel) and capital-revenue (felhalmozási bevétel) columns, and the chapter total confirms a balance of −486,328.4 millió Ft — expenditure fully matched by zero revenue.

This is itself an analytically significant fact rather than a blank entry. The chapter builds roads, expressways, rail infrastructure, and buildings, and records no revenue from any of them. Roads carry identifiable, chargeable vehicles; expressways are the textbook toll-financeable asset; completed state buildings can generate rent or venue revenue; the Castle quarter could generate ticket and venue income. The zero-revenue line is not a fact of nature — it is a financing choice. Every asset in this chapter is provided free at the point of use and financed entirely from general taxation and borrowing. Each of the conditional Keep classifications above for the transport lines, and the self-financing transition proposed for the Castle quarter, would convert part of this zero into genuine user-charge revenue, shifting cost from the general taxpayer onto the identifiable beneficiary. The absence of a revenue column is the clearest single signal in the chapter that the question “who should pay for this asset — the user or the general taxpayer” has been answered, by default, in favour of the general taxpayer throughout.

Revenue	Total (millió Ft)
Total chapter revenue	0.0

Chapter Summary

Classification	Count	Total (millió Ft)
Immediate Cut	1	20,000.0
Phase-Out	4	94,098.4
Nominal Freeze	0	0.0
Keep	5	372,230.0
Total	10	486,328.4

Revenue	Total (millió Ft)
Total chapter revenue	0.0

Year-1 saving across the chapter is 53,406.8 millió Ft: the full 20,000.0 millió Ft Immediate Cut on the Castle line, plus the first-year net savings of the four Phase-Out lines (24,862.0 millió Ft on individual building investments, 7,000.0 millió Ft on near-complete buildings, 666.7 millió Ft on the building-related operating line, and 878.1 millió Ft on utility and waste investments). At full phase-out completion, the chapter’s recurring saving is 114,098.4 millió Ft a year — the Immediate Cut plus the four completed Phase-Outs — roughly 23% of the current envelope, with the remaining 372,230.0 millió Ft retained for the genuine network-precondition transport and investment-preparation functions.

Key Observations

• The chapter finances assets, not functions, and the test is the capital test. Capital expenditure is not automatically more legitimate than current expenditure. The question for every line is whether it accumulates capital that will service real future demand, or redirects saving into a politically-chosen object and consumes it under an investment label. The transport lines mostly pass; the prestige-building and Castle lines do not.

• No consumer plebiscite operates anywhere in the chapter. Every project is financed by general taxation rather than by the people who will use it paying for use. The benchmark for value inside the chapter is schedule adherence, not whether the output was worth its cost. The chapter cannot, from its own data, demonstrate that any line is worth its capital cost — which is why project-level publication and genuine appraisal are the load-bearing conditions on the Keep classifications.

• The zero-revenue column is a financing choice, not a fact of nature. Roads, expressways, rail, and buildings can all generate user-charge revenue. The chapter records none. Moving toll-financeable transport segments toward user charging would shift cost from the general taxpayer — who funds roads they may never drive — onto the identifiable beneficiary, and would let the network’s usage data, rather than an administrative decision, reveal where the next increment of capacity is worth building.

• The Buda Castle line is the chapter’s clearest seen-and-unseen case. The seen is a handsomely restored palace quarter. The unseen is the capital deepening, private investment, and household saving that the same compulsory taxation would have financed — exactly the productive capital formation the country’s convergence gap most needs. A heritage object financed by voluntary giving reveals its actual demand; financed by compulsion, it reveals only the preference of the officeholders who chose it.

• The chapter centralises decisions that belong closer to the ground. Regional road investment, utility and waste-management capital, and the project-selection within the road envelope all depend on local information — settlement patterns, local freight flows, where users actually need infrastructure — that a central investment account does not hold. The reform direction across several lines is the same: keep the function, devolve the project choice to the county, municipal, or operator level that holds the information.

• The “buildings nearing completion” line shows how sunk cost changes the classification. A project 80–90% built represents saving already redirected and a structure already standing; finishing it so it can be used is rational, abandoning it is pure waste. That line is a short Phase-Out — finish the finite near-complete stock, then close — even though the frame’s verdict on the original approval of the prestige projects among them would have been negative.

Sources

Footnotes

1. 2025. évi LXIX. törvény Magyarország 2026. évi központi költségvetéséről. Nemzeti Jogszabálytár / Magyar Közlöny. 2025. https://njt.jog.gov.hu/jogszabaly/2025-69-00-00. Provisions on the XLV chapter: investments financed from the priority-road, expressway, and individual-building lines are accounted on separate project-by-project centrally-managed budget appropriations, and the minister responsible for public finances may reallocate appropriations between individual investments.
   ↩ ↩²

2. KSH (Központi Statisztikai Hivatal). Kereseti adatok — bruttó átlagkereset és mediánkereset (Earnings data — gross average and median earnings). KSH Stadat. 2024. https://www.ksh.hu/stadat_files/mun/hu/mun0008.html. Most recently published data (2024) shows median monthly gross earnings in Hungary at approximately 540,000 Ft. ↩

3. Historizáló populizmus 200 vagy 1000 milliárdért — a budai várnegyed átépítésének költségei. atlatszo.hu. 2017. https://atlatszo.hu/kozpenz/2017/01/16/historizalo-populizmus-200-vagy-1000-milliardert-a-budai-varnegyed-atepitesenek-koltsegei/. The Nemzeti Hauszmann Program (Buda Castle quarter reconstruction) was initially estimated at approximately 200 milliárd Ft; independent cost estimates ran materially higher, and a consolidated through-life programme total has not been published, the managing body having cited national-security grounds. ↩