Most people have a pretty clear idea of which countries in Europe are richer and which are poorer. Income levels thin out the farther south and east you go on the continent, you might assume, while Scandinavia and Germany enjoy the highest income levels. [...]
Overall, wealth is poorly distributed across the European Union, as made clear by March 2016 maps of regional GDP using the latest figures available from Eurostat. Meanwhile, the regions that have seen the largest decreases in per capita GDP aren’t necessarily the ones you’d expect. [...]
The map above, which is adjusted for each nation to show comparable purchasing power, demonstrates how much wealth varies from one region to the next. The former eastern bloc almost universally comes in below average, except for the regions around some of its largest cities: Bucharest, Budapest, Bratislava, Prague, and Warsaw. Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland, meanwhile, emerge as the only states where every region exceeds average wealth.
The rest of the continent is an uneven mosaic, especially in the U.K. At the upper end of the scale, three areas are especially wealthy: London, the region around Oxford, and Northern Scotland’s Aberdeenshire (the landing point for the country’s offshore oil and gas extraction). Elsewhere, West Wales and County Durham have a per capita GDP so much lower that it places them in the same category as Southern Italy or Romania.
No comments:
Post a Comment