Global Highway Maintenance: Diverging Strategies and National Priorities Compared

The analysis of spending on highway maintenance between 2019 and 2023 reveals a complex and uneven picture, in which infrastructure policy choices, economic contingencies, regulatory developments, and different models of highway network management intersect. Maintenance represents a strategic element to ensure the safety, functionality, and durability of highways, and it is often an indicator of the maturity and efficiency with which a country takes care of its infrastructure, beyond the construction of new routes. From the observation of the data, two main trends emerge: on the one hand, countries that maintain or steadily increase investments, showing long-term planning; on the other, those with discontinuous or declining trends, in which maintenance seems to depend on external factors rather than on a coherent strategy.