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).
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.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@44.0999208,27.6257843,15378m/da...
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@44.2123091,27.4520726,3a,75y,35...
https://euobserver.com/justice/126948
"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.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cornwall-33360841
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.
The reason is explained by this guy:
https://cornishstuff.com/2020/05/21/eu-funding-failed-to-ach...
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.
More on ghost infrastructure:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/1198576...
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.
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.