How bad are things in Europe - and how does each country compare?
Well, besides the data below, Polly Curtis' Reality Check series is a good place to start, answering key questions such as What would the collapse of the euro mean for the UK? and What happens if Greece leaves the euro?
We wanted to see which key indicators are the best for comparing Europe and might help us understand what's going on a little better. The best source for this info is Eurostat. You can download the full data below. What would you add?
1. Government debt
These are the big scary numbers - although it's still regularly mixed up with the deficit (see below) by journalists and politicians alike. As a whole, Europe owes €10,125,117,000,000 - or €10.1 trillion. But it's more meaningful to look at the number as a percent of gross domestic product, or GDP. So, we want to see how much that debt is as a proportion of the whole economy - kind of equivalent to measuring your mortgage compared to the whole economic value of your household. That gives us a European average of 80.9% in the second quarter of this year. But that figure hides a lot of variation: Greece, at the top, owes 151.9%, followed by Italy 121.4%. The UK is just below average at 80.1%. There's nothing inherently bad about having a huge debt - it depends who you owe it to and whether you can manage the payments. Bigger countries are also in a better position: essentially, if you owe the bank £50,000, you've got a problem; if you owe the bank £50,000,000, the bank's got a problem.
2. Deficits
If the gross debt is equivalent to your mortgage, the deficit is the overdraft, the running gap between your outgoings and ingoings. Big deficits mean more borrowing, and then running it up all over again to cover the costs of that borrowing.
Again, the best way to look at these is as a percentage of GDP, and Eurstat shows which countries are worst affected, this time from the end of 2010, which is the latest available data. It shows Ireland had the worst deficit then at 31.1% followed by Greece at 10.6% and the UK at 10.3%. Compare that to Germany at 4.3% and you can see the relative strengths of the economies.
3. Are we still in recession?
If you look at changes in GDP - these figures are from the OECD - it does show things improving, albeit slowly. And, as Polly Curtis writes, that the UK's recovery is sporadic, at best.
4. Bond yields
The way governments borrow money is by selling bonds - the interest rate, or "yield", is set when the debt is auctioned. This matters because as a country the higher the rate you have to sell your bonds at, the more you'll have to pay back. In short, the lower the figure the better. As you can see from the chart below, the UK, outside the Euro, is benefiting from being a safe haven. But for Greece, Portugal and Ireland, are considered less safe than Romania and Cyprus. Italy is also in the the top ten worst rates - but this chart is a monthly average, so it doesn't reflect the huge movements going on in the markets today, which have seen Italian rates go up.
5. Unemployment
It might not even be part of the agenda at the summit this week, but unemployment is the indicator with the most direct impact on real people's lives of those here. Traditionally, when there's a recession, unemployment lags behind - ie, it goes up at the end of the recession and takes a while to come down again. This recession has not seen huge changes in overall unemployment yet, although the last year has seen a gradual rise.
Youth unemployment has gone up too - but the percentages are even more striking: 49.6% of 15-24-year-olds in Spain are unemployed, for instance.
Data summary
Download the data
• DATA: download the full spreadsheet
More open data
Data journalism and data visualisations from the Guardian
World government data
• Search the world's government data with our gateway
Development and aid data
• Search the world's global development data with our gateway
Can you do something with this data?
• Flickr Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on our Flickr group
• Contact us at data@guardian.co.uk
• Get the A-Z of data
• More at the Datastore directory
• Follow us on Twitter
• Like us on Facebook
Comments
Sign in to comment or to join the conversation
7 November 2011 5:36PM
So Norway is laughing then?
Also can someone knowledgeable tell me a bit more about how the employment figures work. i.e. 15-24 yr olds ... I'd expect most 15 yr olds to be unemployed.
7 November 2011 8:36PM
Seems nobody is perfect, even Sweden has a higher proportion of 15-24 unemployed than the UK (if they are NEETs).
8 November 2011 11:47AM
Could someone explain the relationship between inflation to growth in these figures.
When I see a 1.1% growth figure quoted with inflation running at 5.5% we in fact contracting at 4.4%
Are the growth figures inflation adjusted?
8 November 2011 12:11PM
Very interesting as it shows that Norway has done very well largely because their governments kept North Sea oil, kept Europe at arms length while Maggie flogged ours to the highest bidder and signed away more of our sovereignty.
How different things may have been today in the UK had we taken such a step in the early days of the North Sea bonanza. History will recall than Tony Benn was right and Maggie wrong on these key decisions.
8 November 2011 3:11PM
«United States of Europe» - The only solution for the European Union survival
http://dbezas.blogspot.com/2011/11/united-states-of-europe-only-solution.html
8 November 2011 3:13PM
«United States of Europe» - The only solution for the European Union survival
http://dbezas.blogspot.com/2011/11/united-states-of-europe-only-solution.html
8 November 2011 3:55PM
You win the prize as the first person to blame Maggie on this thread, it gives you a completely spurious sense of having added something to the debate, when in fact she stopped being PM in 1991 - you amy as well blame Jim Callaghan (he who brought in the IMF in when we were the Greece of the 1970's)
8 November 2011 5:40PM
Real unemployment figures for Spain are lower, a lot lower I'd dare say. Unfortunately plenty Spaniards think nothing of signing on (collecting el paro) while working en B or en negro - as they say.
I don't think the system helps, it's way too generous and you can live fairly decently while collecting el paro. Government should definitely look at changing the benefit system, as it currently stands it doesn't push people to find another job in a great rush.
Another problem in Spain is that large numbers of well prepared young adults refuse to leave their places of birth and move to larger cities where they would be more likely to find work.
9 January 2012 9:06PM
Yes. They are basically change in GDP adjusted for inflation (or deflation).
10 January 2012 12:25AM
Regardless of who's responsible, the point is important. Norway seems to have made the right decisions. If we forget Iceland for the moment, the other Nordic countries also seem to be doing well.
I think it's hard to escape the conclusion that the Nordic people know something about government that the people of most other countries don't know. If so, then the question is "what" do they know?
I don't know "what." However, my guess is that the answer lies largely in their better education systems. I think your Mr Gove should spend more time studying the Nordic countries and less time looking at the U.S. and the Far East.
10 January 2012 11:57AM
High taxes, high service expenditure maybe?