There's little hope of using the budget plan to work out how much the government plans to spend on the transport programme next year. The budget only says that the government will honour the Hungarian Development Bank's outstanding HUF238.1bn debt to National Motorway Rt. The list of investment projects contains no reference to motorways. The Finance Minister dismissed a suggestion made in the autumn that the National Motorway Management Company (AAK) should borrow ?3bn. He was prepared to consider only a "small foreign-currency bond issue" or borrowing from the European Investment Bank.

But even these ideas have changed in the past few days. It would seem that the cabinet intends to force AAK to issue bonds to finance next year's motorway building programmes. But the sums in question would be smaller - only ?1.5-2bn, corresponding to a greatly reduced role for AAK. The government is open about having given up trying to get motorway construction costs off the budget by passing them on to AAK.

The government's awkwardness is fully understandable. Eurostat shot down the government's clever accounting trick at the end of September.

The new task is to make sure that motorways continue being built whilst somehow putting the enterprise on a sound financial footing.

This means that the government must find another way of repaying HUF330bn in loans that it forced the state motorway companies to take out.