Malta spent just 1.3% of its GDP on transport during 2016, a report on government expenditure on transport published by the European Union’s statistics body Eurostat showed on Wednesday. 

Such a figure means that Malta is below the EU average for government expenditure on transport, which stands at 1.9% of GDP.  It also means that Malta was the third lowest in this statistic when compared with all other EU countries in 2016.

The publication stated that government expenditure on transport includes a variety of elements such as administration, regulation and construction and maintenance of transport infrastructure that relates to road, water, rail and air transport and any infrastructure, such as pipelines, that relate to the transport of goods.

Furthermore, the expenditure also includes the operation of public transport corporations classified with the general government sector and any subsidies or investment grants to market producers to operate public transport.

The country with the least government expenditure on transport as per this report is Cyprus, who spends just 0.6% of its GDP on transport, whilst Ireland spends 1.1% of its GDP on transport.

Luxembourg meanwhile registered the highest government expenditure on transport with 3.7% of their GDP spent, and they were closely followed by Hungary and the Czech Republic.  Both these two countries registered an expenditure of 3.5% of their GDP.