The chart above shows change in GDP over the last ten years in EU regions. While the Northern, Eastern, and Western regions of the EU grew by at least one-fifth, the Southern EU has seen nearly no economic growth in the past ten years.
Findings
- The difference between the region with the greatest growth in GDP, the Northern EU, and the region with the least, the Southern EU, is 22.86 percentage points.
- The Northern EU has 9.36 times the economic growth that the Southern EU does in the past decade.
Caveats
- All figures are rounded to the nearest hundredth.
- The Northern EU consists of Sweden, Denmark, and Finland.
- The Eastern EU consists of Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
- The Western EU consists of Germany, United Kingdom, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Ireland, and Luxembourg.
- The Southern EU consists of Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus, and Malta.
Details
Even though the Southern EU is the worst performing region, Malta (a state in the Southern EU) is the EU state with the fastest growing economy in the Union. It is the other Southern EU states that are dragging the region down.
The European Union as a whole has 17.31 percent growth over the same ten year period ranking it under the Western EU and well above the Southern EU.
Sources
Eurostat. 2018. "Eurostat - Tables, Graphs and Maps Interface." Accessed June 26, 2018. http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/tgm/table.do?tab=table&init=1&language=en&pcode=tec00001&plugin=1.