Per-capita GDP has risen most sharply in capital regions across the continent, with the biggest leaps coming from the Dublin region, followed by Inner West London, and the regions around Bucharest, Warsaw, and Bratislava. [...]
Meanwhile, further west there are causes for concern as countries tend to polarize between poorer and richer regions; the U.K. in particular shows an especially patchy growth map. While some sections of London remain extremely (if unequally) wealthy, per capita GDP has dropped immediately to its north, above all in most of the sprawling Yorkshire region, where an ongoing journey from an industrial economy decimated in the 1980s towards a service-oriented one seems to be neither complete nor entirely successful. [...]
Germany’s east side isn’t alone when it come to the aging of its small cities and countryside. The regions north of Hamburg and the rural districts that sandwich the heavily industrialized Ruhr region both have notably high average ages, suggesting that here too, the countryside is being drained of young people, pushing these regions towards becoming agricultural and retirement communities with little urging younger locals to stay. [...]
Another key map in the report highlights just how much Europe’s regions are diverging. The image below relates the GDP of urban regions to their national averages, with blue shading showing rates above national averages and orange showing rates below. Again the U.K. shows cause for concern, with the London region powering ahead of the national average and almost all of its former industrial heartland in central and northern England falling behind. Poland’s contrasts are also notably sharp, with Warsaw far wealthier than the national average while its rural hinterland just to the south is far poorer.
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