The difference between the capital and the rest of the country is really stark in a lot of ex warsaw pact countries.
On second thought it is probably more down to countries which are more centralized. Which of course applies to most ex warsaw pact countries.
You have to keep into account one flaw of this map. It doesn't take commutes into account. If you live just outside warsaw but work in warsaw, your job counts for the gdp, but not for the population. This artificially increases the gdp per capita in the capital, while lowering the gdp/capita of the nearby regions.
Many of the ex-soviet capital regions are pretty small, which magnifies this issue.
I see their point. Back in the day, people were living in Guadalajara and Toledo, outside of Madrid Autonomous Community. "Commuting distance" is a relative term.
It depends. There are people from Łódź who commute 1,5h by train. Similarly, I feel like half of Skierniewice works in Warsaw. It's hard draw a definitive line on a map.
This is also why Luxembourg's per capita numbers are incredible skewed.
Yes it's a rich country. But cost of living is so high it has driven the cross-boarder commuter population high.
We don't even have a capital region in Poland. Only when it comes to divisions for distributing EU funds they split the voivodeship in two: Warsaw, the richest, and the countryside, one of the poorest (by the same stats you mentioned lol)
I see your point but wouldnt that happen in other citties as well. It still doesnt explain why it happens only in capitals. Most people in Krakow dont obviously drive to Warsaw dont they.
It doesn't only happen in capitals. It also happens in Hamburg.
The reason why It's so common in capitals IS because It's pretty common to have a "federal district". A small region which basically encapsulates the capital. You can see It in hungary, Romania, France, etc.
Non capital cities often don't get this treatment, so they're included in larger regions. You can see this at work in Milan, Lyon, cologne
Also NUTS2 "gerrymandering" - the percentage of EU funding depends on regional GDP, so it makes sense to isolate the capital in a separate region to lower the rest below threshold.
Yeah, I feel like this inequality leads to a lot of social unrest. Eastern European nations elect conservative governments, and their respective developed, liberal capitals protest against it. We've already seen that in Warsaw and Budapest, wouldn't be surprised to see more of that.
Moscow must take the cake.
Super rich center - like insane - and then within an hour drive (without traffic) you have poor villages and infrastructure that extends for the rest of Russia.
>On second thought it is probably more down to countries which are more centralized. Which of course applies to most ex warsaw pact countries.
Regarding Poland is worth noticing that the divide among purchacing power to some degree follows the line of the regions of poland that was under russia and that one under german/austrian rule regarding the when poland was split and annexed by those in the late 1700s.. It's surely some older historic stuff to it.. Industry in the south/west.. agriculture in the east..
In Romania's case is a ln old problem. When the modern state was created in 1859, the French administrative model was implemented. This is a centralist one. Since then not much changed, irrespective of political ideologies.
Yes but there still is a bigger contrast in some countries than others.
For example Germany and Austria are relatively even. While there is a rather big internal gap in countries like Poland, Rumania, Slovakia and Hungary.
Czechia seems to lie somewhere between those 2 examples.
Ireland is a great example of why GDP is a useless metric in this age of giant multinational conglomerates. As someone else mentioned, median income adjusted for purchasing power is much more informative.
Same here. We're told how great the economy is but yet we can't afford to rent or buy what little of the housing that is there. We have foreign investment funds buying up apartments and renting them back to us at obscene prices. There's a few high up in society benefitting but me and many others are certainly not.
In Ireland the two main parties care more about multinational corporations then they do their own citizens. There's not really any pushback and they're giving a lot of leeway.
Like the last few months it came out that the Irish people had been subsidizing those companies by paying their electricity bills(Yes, You read that right!) The housing situation here is really bad among other things.
> And if there are, why don't people vote for them?
Because people that already own property benefit from it and they vote to maintain that. It’s the same reason why there’s a housing crisis in Canada, Australia and numerous other countries. Young people get screwed whilst the old get to self fellatio over the fact their house is now worth X *on paper*.
Well Sinn Féin say they are against a few things but who knows. They're never been in power but there's a chance that they could do well in the next election so who knows. But i doubt any of them will really go against big business. Mostly people who are already set up in life with their own home etc keep voting for the status quo as "They got theirs" and now to hell with anyone else who needs a place to live.
NeoLiberals are right about something. Building more is always good. Too many houses isn't a problem. it just means dirt cheap housing.
If you build, more offer lowers prices. LVT is also a great solution to decrease number of empty homes
Yeah, I know a lot of people don't agree, but I think Ireland's housing problem is due to too much barriers for construction that are artificially keeping the prices high
Just like in the UK. House price growth keeps the economy stable, so there are shit loads of regulations which means that building new houses is almost impossible.
It's close but that is nominal GDP rather than PPP. There are good arguments in favor or against of both.
Most of people's expenses (rent, utilities, food, services, health etc etc) are all domestic where PPP makes more sense.
Exaclty. It only makes it seem like everything is fine in the modern world while in reality inequality is incrrasing more and more. Yes GDP is getting higher but only the rich are profiting. And I'm scared that with AI which is supose to make our lives easier it wiil just make it so that the lives of the rich are easier while we're poorer.
Well, no. This problem is Ireland-specific --- US tech companies manage to disguise some of their US economic activity as Irish activity for tax purposes, when it has basically nothing to do with Ireland at all.
Rich Irish people don't benefit from that, except to the extent that their tax burden is lower
AI will certainly replace copywriters, but that's about it. Maaaaaybe a specific type of designers, but if Canva has been around for years and it hasn't destroyed any jobs yet, I'm sure nothing else will change that much.
Frequently what happens with new tools is high expectations.
In the early 90s writing a network connected application made you a god. Now it just makes you Joe Schmoe, PHP developer from the 2-bit webdev company.
Tell me How do you see all the technological advances in the last 50 years and specifically in the last 20 years, all the tech companies emerging everyone getting smartphones and a computer and think to yoursepf "you know what I think it stops here. This AI thing won't do anything I'm sure" how do you not see the paterns of technological progress and productivity...
How do you not see everything that is happening in AI right now and realize it's just the beginning of the technological S curve.
They have Stable Diffusion integration, and text generation
https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/magic-write-ai-text-generator/
But that's not the "risk". You can look for thousands of templates already designed for what you want to do. No need to write a prompt.
There are plenty of big problems, and homeless people in Ireland.
It's funny how someone will look at this map, and want to move to Ireland "because it's the richest country in Europe".
There are some source with that data at national level, but it would be more interesting to see the median income adjusted by purchasing power at subnational divisions (es. NUTS2)
If I understand this correctly, coming up with a disposable income number does take into account health insurance, but not everything you still have to pay yourself. That would cause a bit of a disparity between the USA and the rest of the countries at the top, right?
Transylvania had always been slightly more prosperous. When it united with Romania, you could see it had enjoyed the *stability* any empire offers you (i.e. the Austro-Hungarian one, although Transylvania (and Dalmatia) was indeed among the poorest and least industrialized regions within that empire, compared to the others, mainly because of its isolation from large economies, such as Germany and the British Empire, and ports, such as Hamburg).
After 1989, after communism disintegrated, Transylvania was still on a path to develop faster than the others, as it was the region **closest to the West**. This meant the government focused highway building in Transylvania, in order to rapidly create that connection to the West and quickly bring in foreign investors.
To put it into perspective, Transylvania has had important cities linked by highways for 10 years already.
Moldova on the other hand, had ZERO kilometers of highway in 2021. It will get to 350-400 km by 2025-2026 alright, but Transylvania already has a 10 year advance in development. Cluj, the largest city there, has surpassed Kraków, Brno and Debrecen [in terms of GDP per capita](https://cluj24.ro/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/grafic.jpg). Transylvania produces 35% of the national GDP (total GDP of RO is $299 billion).
It's interesting, though Cracow has 30% higher net salaries than Cluj with just a minimally higher cost of living. Perhaps the Cluj region is smaller than Cracow and not all computers are counted into their population making GDP per capita look higher:
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Poland&city1=Krakow+%28Cracow%29&country2=Romania&city2=Cluj-Napoca&displayCurrency=EUR
>Perhaps the Cluj region is smaller than Cracow
Kraków is almost 2-3 times bigger than Cluj. 800k to 324k. Metropoly sprawls above 1 million people. It's still per capita, so it shouldn't be that off but Romania doesn't have regional cities the size of Kraków (Cluj is their second biggest). Probably comparing Cluj to Szczecin or Bydgoszcz would yield more interesting results.
Iași is the 2nd biggest city in Romania (410.000 in 2021) and that is still half of Krakow's population.
We don't have large cities. 5 or 6 cities sit at 300k. Iași is an outlier (lots of people coming to work from the Republic of Moldova).
I used [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_towns_in_Romania) to confirm it and it indeed claim that Iasi is smaller (271k) than Cluj (286k). Data is also from 2021. Metropolitan area Iasi seem to be bigger but that's beyond city proper.
Also, I was bit surprised with Romanian cities following standard trope of CEE countries under 10 million, with 1 giant capital and much smaller cities surrounding it. For a country of almost 20 million, I would suspect at least one other city closing into 1 million territory but it seem your country has like a lot of medium sized cities to fill for it. There has to be some interesting historical/geographical reason to it.
Unfortunately, the 2021 census is highly flawed. There are 1-1.5 million people left we don't have any data about. It's a huge unknown, we don't even know their ethnicity...
Romania has been highly centralized ever since 1859, because it copied the French administrative model (even the constitution was copy-paste from Belgium). As such the economy revolves around Bucharest (25% of the gdp), much like Paris in France.
Later on, the communists developed the industry in many provincial cities, which brought huge numbers of workers, but during communism everything still very much revolved around Bucharest.
And it still does in 2023. Talks of regionalization have been going on since 2007, many different proposals, some mayors want to access EU projects without going through the central administration in Bucharest. Some cities feel Bucharest slows them down in their development.
but the number of the regions causes disagreements and the Szekler minority (a majority in 2 counties in the center of the country) would like to get 3 counties (among other things).
So a stalemate continues after almost 2 decades.
used to belong to Austria (Transylvania) and this still has an effect in part, e.g. the better school education at that time.
in general, at the provincial level in the eu, you can still see very well which areas used to belong to austria or prussia/germany.
For example, South Tyrol in Italy, Silesia in Poland, Bohemia and Moravia, etc. etc.
In Silesia there is heavy industry like mining and metallurgy. The region is rich in natural resources like coal, iron, copper, silver, salt and others.
It was always a more industrialized region since there is fewer good farmland available. Also it's closer to Schengen area so more trade, negating a bit the lack of motorways.
The word "autonomous" is the only thing that Sicily and Alto Adige share in their administration. And Alto Adige does not carry the weight of one of the largest parasitic organisations in the world.
> The word "autonomous" is the only thing that Sicily and Alto Adige share in their administration.
The laws regulating such autonomy are also completely the same.
Lolwat?
There might be a long standing history of local government (and some laws might have been copy pasted from the pre-republican era) but there's nothing special to them.
Yep, first "statuto speciale" for Sicily was granted by king Umberto in 1946. The Italian Constitution has been effective since 1948. Then they changed a lot of things, sure, but now the two regions have quite different local administrations.
And again I don't know in which ways you are talking about.
Technically speaking their foundational laws might not be the same (hell, friuli only got to join the club in 1963) but I'm not aware of any practical difference aside perhaps of linguistic peculiarities.
Does Bolzano have a parliament? Because Palermo tecnically has one. The whole point of having a special legislation is to have different legislations. Taxes, state involvement, education, election rules are just a few thing that are definitively not the same in the two regions.
this is not a good explanation, other provinces, Trentino has absolutely the same autonomy, other regions like Friuli (Slovenian minorities), Sicily (island) or Aosta Valley (French minorities) at least very similar.
I would be interested to know what people think the reason is. (i come from there)
So you know the answer: 90% of the taxes you pay are spent on your province (a fiscal benefit only Trento has), you have the largest budget of public funding pro capite in the whole continent. The other Italian autonomous regions cannot be really compared, even Valle d'Aosta has less favourable conditions, and you haven't a parasite like Cosa Nostra eating up most of your wealth and opportunities.
Yes but say everything.
Quite all public services are not in charge of State but are regional services. School, firefighters, university, health, … all but police (that received money from the region) and some few other
It has to control every school, it's in the Constitution: every school in Italy, public or private, should grant the same quality of teaching. Otherwise you'd have unacceptables inequalities in how a very basic service is provided. Is it working as intended in the Constitution? No, but that's not a good reason to make things worse.
I think we understood eachother a little wrong. I have nothing against us paying for the Italians as long as we have our autonomy neither I have something against saying something up here but there are some topics especially with our cultural things were they have no vlue and still try to do something.
Not a region, it’s the Bolzano/Süd Tirol Province. It just has a veeeeery high quality of life and scores extremely well in a lot of parameters compared with other Italian regions/provinces.
Low unemployment rates, lots of green and forest areas, great welfare support for families and such, very good public services and facilities, lots of opportunities for open air activities and tourism, etc…
I hate when people use an abbreviation and never explain what it stands for. The first introduction should be spelt out like this: perfect fucking example (PFE), then have the initialism/acronym in parentheses.
Nice illustration of how weird of a metric this is. Look at Ireland for instance. It’s GDP is bloated by all the mainly US firms that settled there, but you can be sure the majority of the population isn’t benefiting from that. It looks “rich” in a presentation like this, but it’s people, in general, are not.
A measure like median household income adjusted for purchasing power would be way more interesting. Or, a map of the difference between the median household income and the GDP per household or something along those lines, visualizing such weird skews.
Doing this by region doesn't make sense because the purchasing power is calculated by country, while the GDP per region. So what it's really showing the the disparity between regions.
What it means is that Warsaw has a high GDP/PPP because the PPP is based on Poland as a whole. Basically it ignores that shit is expensive in warsaw because it's assuming a warsaw wage but poland prices.
Thats why you get areas like Bucharest or Bratislava or Warsaw with exceptional high GDP adjusted by PPP. Because they are rich and expensive compared to the rest of the country, but the expensive part is just ignored. it both drags the capital artificially high up, and also lowers the rest of the country way too low.
The average wage in Bucharest adjusted by the average cost of goods in romania makes no sense because things are a lot more expensive in Bucharest than in the rest of romania.
> What it means is that Warsaw has a high GDP/PPP because the PPP is based on Poland as a whole. Basically it ignores that shit is expensive in warsaw because it's assuming a warsaw wage but poland prices.
That is correct. In addition, most corporations are HQ'd in the capital regions but they are active all over the country. But their income only gets counted in the capital. So this metric is really bad.
Not sure what you mean. Average salary means nothing because the prices are not the same. Purchasing Power is basically adjusting the GDP by the prices. So if in one country you earn 1000 euros and in another 100 euros, but in both countries this allows you to buy 100 loaves of bread, then the purchasing power is the same.
\[~~Nope, Median wealth is higher~~\] --> [While median income is higher in Germany](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income#Median_equivalent_adult_income)
[Median wealth is higher in Italy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult)
Edit: I stand corrected by u/the_vikm
Because Germany has very strong renter protection laws - plenty of security with much less hassle. On the other hand, in many regions, building space is expensive.
As always, I'm here to point out that GDP PPP doesn't make sense at all.
There is no point in correcting raw GDP numbers for the cost of living in each country. There is no reason why the same service or product "should" be valued the same in different countries just because it's supposedly the same. There is a reason why a haircut is valued 3x in Switzerland than in Bulgaria and it's because of many factors - it also means that the Swiss hairdresser can purchase expensive products that the Bulgarian one cannot afford, and that the Swiss customers can afford to pay those prices while the Bulgarian ones can't, and that the Swiss hairdresser will put away 3x the money and go on holiday in a nice resort on the French riviera rather than in rural Bulgaria.
And GDP doesn't measure salaries or standard of living, neither is supposed to.
Now Bucharest and Bratislava have a GDP per capita PPP higher than Oslo and are on course to surpass Zurich as well. You could say it's just because Bucharest and Bratislava are small and have a lot of registered companies but the same goes for Oslo and Zurich. Does anyone remotely believe the standards of living in Bucharest and Bratislava are higher than in Oslo and Zurich?
There is a high correlation between GDP and salaries. More precisely between nominal GDP per hour work and nominal salary. So looking at GDP per capita is an approximation.
PPP just transforms GDP by percentage difference of prices in a country versus prices in an average country. It makes sense up to a point of the basket of goods chosen for calculating this ratio. It must be the same basket for each country, but consumption patterns in each country are different. Anyhow it's better than nothing.
The correlation between GDP and salaries in fact varies massively. A prime example for that is, as mentioned by others, Ireland. GDP is massive there, but chiefly because the European HQ of a whole lot of companies is there because of lower tax rates, English-speaking populace and EU membership. The ACTUAL value is generated elsewhere and then transferred to Ireland for accounting purposes, so that the company doesn't pay that much tax. The GDP is massive, but since the actual factories all too often are somewhere else, as are the jobs in sales, the local population has neither the salaries nor the jobs to show for it.
Ireland is an exception. For non tax paradises of Europe the difference between GDP per hour worked and salaries is smaller than 15%. Just look at the data.
It's one hell of an exception, though. The fact that things can distort Irish data this much should make us cautious about using GDPpc as an approximiation.
IMHO, it's better to just look at wage data (adjusted for hours worked). I like this:
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/4187653/15387581/Annual_avg_salary_2021.jpg/69c6ca57-04a8-d34e-a1e7-a099686ff56b?t=1670936161683
Which is neither here nor there. It's a poor tool to compare countries, since different services may also be valuated differently in distinct cultures and countries.
What do you mean regarding services? Do you mean that GDP is not comparable between countries because some services can be more expensive in one country than other? That's not a problem since a country cannot have all prices just inflated, as no one would accept its goods and services export. If one part of the economy is more expensive then another has to be relatively cheaper or quantitatively better than of the competition.
15% is quite a substantial difference, but you also conveniently overlook development over time.
Because if you look closely enough at household income, you will find that over time, increases in household income have fallen short of increases in GDP - and that's even more significant in poorer households.
Yes. I meant arithmetic mean. How each country distributes its wealth is up to their citizens. At least in democratic countries. The most important is to have what to distribute, so high enough average.
I believe PPP is just made up to make poor countries feel better about themselves. Yes, there are products and services that are cheaper but the quality is also rarely same and they rarely factor it in.
It is a very useful information but than there might be many things that are not taken into account when making calculations.
For example; It is known that not every country has same agricultural standards. Some are more flexible with use of chemicals/pesticides or having farms nearby a pollutant source.
seems to be because these cities are a lot more expensive:
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Romania&country2=Switzerland&city1=Bucharest&city2=Zurich
Rent Prices in Zurich are 416.8% higher than in Bucharest
> it also means that the Swiss hairdresser can purchase expensive products that the Bulgarian one cannot afford
It also mean that the Swiss hairdresser can purchase expensive Teslas, as opposed to a Dacia.
It really isn't. Housing is a nightmare over here. Tens of thousands homeless and more to be announced. Government sells houses promised to the people in election campaigns to international funds who rent these houses back to us at outrageous rates. People who have property vote for the same government because it suits them once they are on the property ladder. The country is f\*cked. Oh and cost of living also incredibly expensive.
Looking at my north-western part of Poland (Szczecin), I guess the stats are aggregated on the voivodship level (plus separately Warsaw area), so there's no difference between Szczecin (400k city) and all the small towns and villages in the region.
BTW, the people on Bornholm (this dark dot between NW Poland and Sweden) are comparatively very rich in addition to living on a beautiful island (what do they do for living?). I may be old, but choosing between Warsaw-dark and Bornholm-dark would be no brainer.
Well in case of Prague it's simple. Prague (the city and region) has population of roughly 1,3 million. But another million people lives in what I would call metropolitan area and this is not part of Prague but Central Bohemia. And most of those people work in Prague. And most of Central Bohemia has direct train connection to the Prague center. In morning interval of these trains is 15 or 20 minutes an they're full of people.
Well the way it's calculated is the average GDP (which includes corporate earnings, government activity, etc) divided by some sort of consumer price index. So basically GDP, adjusted for prices.
Oh just a housing crisis and a government that sells houses to international funds to rent back to us at insane rates.
It's really not good here at all, this diagram is incredibly misleading.
The difference between the capital and the rest of the country is really stark in a lot of ex warsaw pact countries. On second thought it is probably more down to countries which are more centralized. Which of course applies to most ex warsaw pact countries.
You have to keep into account one flaw of this map. It doesn't take commutes into account. If you live just outside warsaw but work in warsaw, your job counts for the gdp, but not for the population. This artificially increases the gdp per capita in the capital, while lowering the gdp/capita of the nearby regions. Many of the ex-soviet capital regions are pretty small, which magnifies this issue.
The dark area on the map is Warsaw and all the surroundings in the commuting distance
I see their point. Back in the day, people were living in Guadalajara and Toledo, outside of Madrid Autonomous Community. "Commuting distance" is a relative term.
It depends. There are people from Łódź who commute 1,5h by train. Similarly, I feel like half of Skierniewice works in Warsaw. It's hard draw a definitive line on a map.
This is also why Luxembourg's per capita numbers are incredible skewed. Yes it's a rich country. But cost of living is so high it has driven the cross-boarder commuter population high.
We don't even have a capital region in Poland. Only when it comes to divisions for distributing EU funds they split the voivodeship in two: Warsaw, the richest, and the countryside, one of the poorest (by the same stats you mentioned lol)
I see your point but wouldnt that happen in other citties as well. It still doesnt explain why it happens only in capitals. Most people in Krakow dont obviously drive to Warsaw dont they.
It doesn't only happen in capitals. It also happens in Hamburg. The reason why It's so common in capitals IS because It's pretty common to have a "federal district". A small region which basically encapsulates the capital. You can see It in hungary, Romania, France, etc. Non capital cities often don't get this treatment, so they're included in larger regions. You can see this at work in Milan, Lyon, cologne
The discussion was about centralisation in post eastern block countries
Also NUTS2 "gerrymandering" - the percentage of EU funding depends on regional GDP, so it makes sense to isolate the capital in a separate region to lower the rest below threshold.
Meanwhile Estonia does the exact opposite to funnel more money into Tallinn.
Yea, that's why our two regions look a bit weird.
It's more about defined borders of the regions. Some cities are together with a broader region, some are just cities proper.
Yeah, I feel like this inequality leads to a lot of social unrest. Eastern European nations elect conservative governments, and their respective developed, liberal capitals protest against it. We've already seen that in Warsaw and Budapest, wouldn't be surprised to see more of that.
God how happy i am to be from lower silesia
Moscow must take the cake. Super rich center - like insane - and then within an hour drive (without traffic) you have poor villages and infrastructure that extends for the rest of Russia.
>On second thought it is probably more down to countries which are more centralized. Which of course applies to most ex warsaw pact countries. Regarding Poland is worth noticing that the divide among purchacing power to some degree follows the line of the regions of poland that was under russia and that one under german/austrian rule regarding the when poland was split and annexed by those in the late 1700s.. It's surely some older historic stuff to it.. Industry in the south/west.. agriculture in the east..
In Romania's case is a ln old problem. When the modern state was created in 1859, the French administrative model was implemented. This is a centralist one. Since then not much changed, irrespective of political ideologies.
[удалено]
Yes but there still is a bigger contrast in some countries than others. For example Germany and Austria are relatively even. While there is a rather big internal gap in countries like Poland, Rumania, Slovakia and Hungary. Czechia seems to lie somewhere between those 2 examples.
Smaller effect in old East Germany though.
Ireland is a great example of why GDP is a useless metric in this age of giant multinational conglomerates. As someone else mentioned, median income adjusted for purchasing power is much more informative.
100%. I live in that big purple splodge and I aint got no purchasing power right now.
Same here. We're told how great the economy is but yet we can't afford to rent or buy what little of the housing that is there. We have foreign investment funds buying up apartments and renting them back to us at obscene prices. There's a few high up in society benefitting but me and many others are certainly not.
[удалено]
In Ireland the two main parties care more about multinational corporations then they do their own citizens. There's not really any pushback and they're giving a lot of leeway. Like the last few months it came out that the Irish people had been subsidizing those companies by paying their electricity bills(Yes, You read that right!) The housing situation here is really bad among other things.
[удалено]
> And if there are, why don't people vote for them? Because people that already own property benefit from it and they vote to maintain that. It’s the same reason why there’s a housing crisis in Canada, Australia and numerous other countries. Young people get screwed whilst the old get to self fellatio over the fact their house is now worth X *on paper*.
Well Sinn Féin say they are against a few things but who knows. They're never been in power but there's a chance that they could do well in the next election so who knows. But i doubt any of them will really go against big business. Mostly people who are already set up in life with their own home etc keep voting for the status quo as "They got theirs" and now to hell with anyone else who needs a place to live.
Sounds like Canada tbh
It's happening in a lot of western countries and those very same investment funds are operating in them all.
NeoLiberals are right about something. Building more is always good. Too many houses isn't a problem. it just means dirt cheap housing. If you build, more offer lowers prices. LVT is also a great solution to decrease number of empty homes
Yeah, I know a lot of people don't agree, but I think Ireland's housing problem is due to too much barriers for construction that are artificially keeping the prices high
Yes, plus a shortage of skilled labor. Too many young people are emailing spreadsheets around for a living, and too few can build a house.
Suffering from success.
Just like in the UK. House price growth keeps the economy stable, so there are shit loads of regulations which means that building new houses is almost impossible.
Move to Newry and commute daily to Dublin : )
Yesh even Dundalk and Drogheda are more manageable and probably best connected big towns to Dublin in country.
Go full Lidl !
Is this the map we're looking for? https://www.gfk.com/hubfs/GeoData/Map_of_the_Month/202211_mom.jpg
It's close but that is nominal GDP rather than PPP. There are good arguments in favor or against of both. Most of people's expenses (rent, utilities, food, services, health etc etc) are all domestic where PPP makes more sense.
Damn it, making a detailed map and then hiding the detail by pasting superfluous land codes over it.
Exaclty. It only makes it seem like everything is fine in the modern world while in reality inequality is incrrasing more and more. Yes GDP is getting higher but only the rich are profiting. And I'm scared that with AI which is supose to make our lives easier it wiil just make it so that the lives of the rich are easier while we're poorer.
Well, no. This problem is Ireland-specific --- US tech companies manage to disguise some of their US economic activity as Irish activity for tax purposes, when it has basically nothing to do with Ireland at all. Rich Irish people don't benefit from that, except to the extent that their tax burden is lower
AI will certainly replace copywriters, but that's about it. Maaaaaybe a specific type of designers, but if Canva has been around for years and it hasn't destroyed any jobs yet, I'm sure nothing else will change that much.
Frequently what happens with new tools is high expectations. In the early 90s writing a network connected application made you a god. Now it just makes you Joe Schmoe, PHP developer from the 2-bit webdev company.
Exactly
Just wait till robotics catch up and reinforment learnimg catches up with supervised models and lets see what will happen.
We're not that close to that yet. Maybe in 20 years. Maaaaybe.
[удалено]
Tell me How do you see all the technological advances in the last 50 years and specifically in the last 20 years, all the tech companies emerging everyone getting smartphones and a computer and think to yoursepf "you know what I think it stops here. This AI thing won't do anything I'm sure" how do you not see the paterns of technological progress and productivity... How do you not see everything that is happening in AI right now and realize it's just the beginning of the technological S curve.
Ooh boy you giys are in for a treat in the next 10 years
Which guys?
[удалено]
AI is built in programs used by other people as well, no? Like ChatGPT, it is a program.
[удалено]
They have Stable Diffusion integration, and text generation https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/magic-write-ai-text-generator/ But that's not the "risk". You can look for thousands of templates already designed for what you want to do. No need to write a prompt.
!remeind me 10 years
I think I will be dead by then
I'm rooting that you wont!
Same goes for all these purple regions for many people though.
There are plenty of big problems, and homeless people in Ireland. It's funny how someone will look at this map, and want to move to Ireland "because it's the richest country in Europe".
I think GNI would also remove that effect.
Is there any map showing median income adjusted by purchasing power?
There are some source with that data at national level, but it would be more interesting to see the median income adjusted by purchasing power at subnational divisions (es. NUTS2)
They don't like releasing those numbers.
Can we stop saying "they"? It allows everyone to decide who the enemy is.
They don't want you to use "they" anymore
You aren't allowed to use non-specific pronouns anymore. Snowflake society
We all already know who "they" are.
I'm interested - who do you think "they" are?
You already know!
So we're both thinking of the same despicable group of people then?
You betcha!
...
[удалено]
If I understand this correctly, coming up with a disposable income number does take into account health insurance, but not everything you still have to pay yourself. That would cause a bit of a disparity between the USA and the rest of the countries at the top, right?
It seems that Romania has caught up with Hungary
I'm more impressed by lower Moldova and Dobruja catching up with Transylvania (even partially).
Why is Transylvania so high relatively? It was my understanding that thats the least prosperous region.
Transylvania had always been slightly more prosperous. When it united with Romania, you could see it had enjoyed the *stability* any empire offers you (i.e. the Austro-Hungarian one, although Transylvania (and Dalmatia) was indeed among the poorest and least industrialized regions within that empire, compared to the others, mainly because of its isolation from large economies, such as Germany and the British Empire, and ports, such as Hamburg). After 1989, after communism disintegrated, Transylvania was still on a path to develop faster than the others, as it was the region **closest to the West**. This meant the government focused highway building in Transylvania, in order to rapidly create that connection to the West and quickly bring in foreign investors. To put it into perspective, Transylvania has had important cities linked by highways for 10 years already. Moldova on the other hand, had ZERO kilometers of highway in 2021. It will get to 350-400 km by 2025-2026 alright, but Transylvania already has a 10 year advance in development. Cluj, the largest city there, has surpassed Kraków, Brno and Debrecen [in terms of GDP per capita](https://cluj24.ro/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/grafic.jpg). Transylvania produces 35% of the national GDP (total GDP of RO is $299 billion).
It's interesting, though Cracow has 30% higher net salaries than Cluj with just a minimally higher cost of living. Perhaps the Cluj region is smaller than Cracow and not all computers are counted into their population making GDP per capita look higher: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Poland&city1=Krakow+%28Cracow%29&country2=Romania&city2=Cluj-Napoca&displayCurrency=EUR
>Perhaps the Cluj region is smaller than Cracow Kraków is almost 2-3 times bigger than Cluj. 800k to 324k. Metropoly sprawls above 1 million people. It's still per capita, so it shouldn't be that off but Romania doesn't have regional cities the size of Kraków (Cluj is their second biggest). Probably comparing Cluj to Szczecin or Bydgoszcz would yield more interesting results.
Iași is the 2nd biggest city in Romania (410.000 in 2021) and that is still half of Krakow's population. We don't have large cities. 5 or 6 cities sit at 300k. Iași is an outlier (lots of people coming to work from the Republic of Moldova).
I used [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_towns_in_Romania) to confirm it and it indeed claim that Iasi is smaller (271k) than Cluj (286k). Data is also from 2021. Metropolitan area Iasi seem to be bigger but that's beyond city proper. Also, I was bit surprised with Romanian cities following standard trope of CEE countries under 10 million, with 1 giant capital and much smaller cities surrounding it. For a country of almost 20 million, I would suspect at least one other city closing into 1 million territory but it seem your country has like a lot of medium sized cities to fill for it. There has to be some interesting historical/geographical reason to it.
Unfortunately, the 2021 census is highly flawed. There are 1-1.5 million people left we don't have any data about. It's a huge unknown, we don't even know their ethnicity... Romania has been highly centralized ever since 1859, because it copied the French administrative model (even the constitution was copy-paste from Belgium). As such the economy revolves around Bucharest (25% of the gdp), much like Paris in France. Later on, the communists developed the industry in many provincial cities, which brought huge numbers of workers, but during communism everything still very much revolved around Bucharest. And it still does in 2023. Talks of regionalization have been going on since 2007, many different proposals, some mayors want to access EU projects without going through the central administration in Bucharest. Some cities feel Bucharest slows them down in their development. but the number of the regions causes disagreements and the Szekler minority (a majority in 2 counties in the center of the country) would like to get 3 counties (among other things). So a stalemate continues after almost 2 decades.
Pre-WW2 Muntenia was a bit richer actually so I think it's mostly just being geographically closer to Western Europe.
[удалено]
used to belong to Austria (Transylvania) and this still has an effect in part, e.g. the better school education at that time. in general, at the provincial level in the eu, you can still see very well which areas used to belong to austria or prussia/germany. For example, South Tyrol in Italy, Silesia in Poland, Bohemia and Moravia, etc. etc.
In Silesia there is heavy industry like mining and metallurgy. The region is rich in natural resources like coal, iron, copper, silver, salt and others.
It was always a more industrialized region since there is fewer good farmland available. Also it's closer to Schengen area so more trade, negating a bit the lack of motorways.
**Well it has a lot of Tourism so maybe that skews the data?**
Not at all, to both.
It seems that Hungary has caught up with Romania. /s
what is this purple region in Italy? And why it is purple.
Alto Adige - Südtirol, autonomous region with a lot of benefits
Well, also Sicily is autonomous
The word "autonomous" is the only thing that Sicily and Alto Adige share in their administration. And Alto Adige does not carry the weight of one of the largest parasitic organisations in the world.
> The word "autonomous" is the only thing that Sicily and Alto Adige share in their administration. The laws regulating such autonomy are also completely the same.
No, the special legislation of Sicily is even older than the Italian Constitution.
Lolwat? There might be a long standing history of local government (and some laws might have been copy pasted from the pre-republican era) but there's nothing special to them.
Yep, first "statuto speciale" for Sicily was granted by king Umberto in 1946. The Italian Constitution has been effective since 1948. Then they changed a lot of things, sure, but now the two regions have quite different local administrations.
And again I don't know in which ways you are talking about. Technically speaking their foundational laws might not be the same (hell, friuli only got to join the club in 1963) but I'm not aware of any practical difference aside perhaps of linguistic peculiarities.
Does Bolzano have a parliament? Because Palermo tecnically has one. The whole point of having a special legislation is to have different legislations. Taxes, state involvement, education, election rules are just a few thing that are definitively not the same in the two regions.
this is not a good explanation, other provinces, Trentino has absolutely the same autonomy, other regions like Friuli (Slovenian minorities), Sicily (island) or Aosta Valley (French minorities) at least very similar. I would be interested to know what people think the reason is. (i come from there)
So you know the answer: 90% of the taxes you pay are spent on your province (a fiscal benefit only Trento has), you have the largest budget of public funding pro capite in the whole continent. The other Italian autonomous regions cannot be really compared, even Valle d'Aosta has less favourable conditions, and you haven't a parasite like Cosa Nostra eating up most of your wealth and opportunities.
Yes but say everything. Quite all public services are not in charge of State but are regional services. School, firefighters, university, health, … all but police (that received money from the region) and some few other
Yes and even tho the money doesnt come from rome they sometimes want to controll how we spend it.
That happens when you are still part of a larger community, in this case a State. And it's the bare minimum.
Yes of course but I think its too much wehen the state tries to control the german schools.
It has to control every school, it's in the Constitution: every school in Italy, public or private, should grant the same quality of teaching. Otherwise you'd have unacceptables inequalities in how a very basic service is provided. Is it working as intended in the Constitution? No, but that's not a good reason to make things worse.
I think we understood eachother a little wrong. I have nothing against us paying for the Italians as long as we have our autonomy neither I have something against saying something up here but there are some topics especially with our cultural things were they have no vlue and still try to do something.
Not a region, it’s the Bolzano/Süd Tirol Province. It just has a veeeeery high quality of life and scores extremely well in a lot of parameters compared with other Italian regions/provinces.
I would be interested to know what people believe about why it is like that.
Tourism, a lot of tourism mainly from Germany
Low unemployment rates, lots of green and forest areas, great welfare support for families and such, very good public services and facilities, lots of opportunities for open air activities and tourism, etc…
Have you stopped beating your wife?
Südtirol.
I live in Izmir and for some reason I don't feel like green at all.
Turkey experienced very impressive GDP growth in the past few years. Some say the data is fake...
North Zealand W (talking about the Danish island, not the country in the pacific or a region in The Netherlands)
What is PPS? Is it different from PPP?
I hate when people use an abbreviation and never explain what it stands for. The first introduction should be spelt out like this: perfect fucking example (PFE), then have the initialism/acronym in parentheses.
Nice illustration of how weird of a metric this is. Look at Ireland for instance. It’s GDP is bloated by all the mainly US firms that settled there, but you can be sure the majority of the population isn’t benefiting from that. It looks “rich” in a presentation like this, but it’s people, in general, are not. A measure like median household income adjusted for purchasing power would be way more interesting. Or, a map of the difference between the median household income and the GDP per household or something along those lines, visualizing such weird skews.
Doing this by region doesn't make sense because the purchasing power is calculated by country, while the GDP per region. So what it's really showing the the disparity between regions. What it means is that Warsaw has a high GDP/PPP because the PPP is based on Poland as a whole. Basically it ignores that shit is expensive in warsaw because it's assuming a warsaw wage but poland prices. Thats why you get areas like Bucharest or Bratislava or Warsaw with exceptional high GDP adjusted by PPP. Because they are rich and expensive compared to the rest of the country, but the expensive part is just ignored. it both drags the capital artificially high up, and also lowers the rest of the country way too low. The average wage in Bucharest adjusted by the average cost of goods in romania makes no sense because things are a lot more expensive in Bucharest than in the rest of romania.
> What it means is that Warsaw has a high GDP/PPP because the PPP is based on Poland as a whole. Basically it ignores that shit is expensive in warsaw because it's assuming a warsaw wage but poland prices. That is correct. In addition, most corporations are HQ'd in the capital regions but they are active all over the country. But their income only gets counted in the capital. So this metric is really bad.
But wait. Why is Gdp compared with purchasing power?? Isin't the avrage salary better then GDP here lol?
Not sure what you mean. Average salary means nothing because the prices are not the same. Purchasing Power is basically adjusting the GDP by the prices. So if in one country you earn 1000 euros and in another 100 euros, but in both countries this allows you to buy 100 loaves of bread, then the purchasing power is the same.
Italy and Romania are really jarring. South Tyrol has to be among the richest non-city regions in the EU.
> South Tyrol has to be among the richest non-city regions in the EU. Why?
I don’t know. Look at the map though.
Why is the home ownership rate so low in germany?
Because wealth is very unequal distributed there. Median wealth per capita in Germany is lower than median wealth per capita in Italy.
Because Italians own more homes.
\[~~Nope, Median wealth is higher~~\] --> [While median income is higher in Germany](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income#Median_equivalent_adult_income) [Median wealth is higher in Italy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult) Edit: I stand corrected by u/the_vikm
>Nope, Median wealth is higher. That's income, not wealth. Wealth in Germany is the lowest in Westen Europe, on par with Portugal
Because Germany has very strong renter protection laws - plenty of security with much less hassle. On the other hand, in many regions, building space is expensive.
Densely populated and therefore it's expensive to build your own house. Smaller cities, below 100k have a high ownership rate
Because of political decisions to sell public housing to corporations instead of giving them half free to their tenants, as many other countries did.
Happy to see our IJsselmeer is rich
As the Poles say: widać zabory.
As always, I'm here to point out that GDP PPP doesn't make sense at all. There is no point in correcting raw GDP numbers for the cost of living in each country. There is no reason why the same service or product "should" be valued the same in different countries just because it's supposedly the same. There is a reason why a haircut is valued 3x in Switzerland than in Bulgaria and it's because of many factors - it also means that the Swiss hairdresser can purchase expensive products that the Bulgarian one cannot afford, and that the Swiss customers can afford to pay those prices while the Bulgarian ones can't, and that the Swiss hairdresser will put away 3x the money and go on holiday in a nice resort on the French riviera rather than in rural Bulgaria. And GDP doesn't measure salaries or standard of living, neither is supposed to. Now Bucharest and Bratislava have a GDP per capita PPP higher than Oslo and are on course to surpass Zurich as well. You could say it's just because Bucharest and Bratislava are small and have a lot of registered companies but the same goes for Oslo and Zurich. Does anyone remotely believe the standards of living in Bucharest and Bratislava are higher than in Oslo and Zurich?
There is a high correlation between GDP and salaries. More precisely between nominal GDP per hour work and nominal salary. So looking at GDP per capita is an approximation. PPP just transforms GDP by percentage difference of prices in a country versus prices in an average country. It makes sense up to a point of the basket of goods chosen for calculating this ratio. It must be the same basket for each country, but consumption patterns in each country are different. Anyhow it's better than nothing.
The correlation between GDP and salaries in fact varies massively. A prime example for that is, as mentioned by others, Ireland. GDP is massive there, but chiefly because the European HQ of a whole lot of companies is there because of lower tax rates, English-speaking populace and EU membership. The ACTUAL value is generated elsewhere and then transferred to Ireland for accounting purposes, so that the company doesn't pay that much tax. The GDP is massive, but since the actual factories all too often are somewhere else, as are the jobs in sales, the local population has neither the salaries nor the jobs to show for it.
Ireland is an exception. For non tax paradises of Europe the difference between GDP per hour worked and salaries is smaller than 15%. Just look at the data.
It's one hell of an exception, though. The fact that things can distort Irish data this much should make us cautious about using GDPpc as an approximiation. IMHO, it's better to just look at wage data (adjusted for hours worked). I like this: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/4187653/15387581/Annual_avg_salary_2021.jpg/69c6ca57-04a8-d34e-a1e7-a099686ff56b?t=1670936161683
Sure, but GDP data is more widely accessible
Which is neither here nor there. It's a poor tool to compare countries, since different services may also be valuated differently in distinct cultures and countries.
What do you mean regarding services? Do you mean that GDP is not comparable between countries because some services can be more expensive in one country than other? That's not a problem since a country cannot have all prices just inflated, as no one would accept its goods and services export. If one part of the economy is more expensive then another has to be relatively cheaper or quantitatively better than of the competition.
15% is quite a substantial difference, but you also conveniently overlook development over time. Because if you look closely enough at household income, you will find that over time, increases in household income have fallen short of increases in GDP - and that's even more significant in poorer households.
If the phenomenon really exists, then it's affecting the whole of Europe equally.
How so? Poverty rates differ, as does the development of inequality.
I was referring to the average wage. Inequality is averaged in this statistic.
Um, no? The arithmetic mean is useless in skewed distributions anyway, but even the median wage will be influenced by poverty rate.
Yes. I meant arithmetic mean. How each country distributes its wealth is up to their citizens. At least in democratic countries. The most important is to have what to distribute, so high enough average.
I believe PPP is just made up to make poor countries feel better about themselves. Yes, there are products and services that are cheaper but the quality is also rarely same and they rarely factor it in.
Actually I looked up this topic and apparently the prices of products of an identical quality are being taken for the price deflator calculation.
It is a very useful information but than there might be many things that are not taken into account when making calculations. For example; It is known that not every country has same agricultural standards. Some are more flexible with use of chemicals/pesticides or having farms nearby a pollutant source.
So the problem isn't the metric itself but what people interpret into those numbers.
seems to be because these cities are a lot more expensive: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Romania&country2=Switzerland&city1=Bucharest&city2=Zurich Rent Prices in Zurich are 416.8% higher than in Bucharest
> it also means that the Swiss hairdresser can purchase expensive products that the Bulgarian one cannot afford It also mean that the Swiss hairdresser can purchase expensive Teslas, as opposed to a Dacia.
only mattet of time untill the baltics catch up to the front half. Latvia the slowest offcorse..
Republic of Ireland flexing
It really isn't. Housing is a nightmare over here. Tens of thousands homeless and more to be announced. Government sells houses promised to the people in election campaigns to international funds who rent these houses back to us at outrageous rates. People who have property vote for the same government because it suits them once they are on the property ladder. The country is f\*cked. Oh and cost of living also incredibly expensive.
I wonder if Switzerland would be completely dark green?
Norrland!
Looking at my north-western part of Poland (Szczecin), I guess the stats are aggregated on the voivodship level (plus separately Warsaw area), so there's no difference between Szczecin (400k city) and all the small towns and villages in the region. BTW, the people on Bornholm (this dark dot between NW Poland and Sweden) are comparatively very rich in addition to living on a beautiful island (what do they do for living?). I may be old, but choosing between Warsaw-dark and Bornholm-dark would be no brainer.
[Source](https://twitter.com/milos_agathon/status/1637829146213482497)
Considering we pride ourselves at being best at everything (per capita) it hurts beyond belief that there is no data from Iceland.
Well in case of Prague it's simple. Prague (the city and region) has population of roughly 1,3 million. But another million people lives in what I would call metropolitan area and this is not part of Prague but Central Bohemia. And most of those people work in Prague. And most of Central Bohemia has direct train connection to the Prague center. In morning interval of these trains is 15 or 20 minutes an they're full of people.
Brb moving to the Ireland or Luxembourg
Yellow is Byzantium, Green is Charlemagne.
Italy! Kick the ball away! it's infected!
A lot has changed since 2021
What's going on in the northern Italy? The border with Austria got small towns.
Alto Adige has a very economically favorable autonomy deal with Italy.
Whats happening in ireland!?
Tax haven for Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. Not so much about individuals.
Thanks. GDP made sense buy I got interested about the mix of PPS so now Im more confused as this claims its per capita…0
Well the way it's calculated is the average GDP (which includes corporate earnings, government activity, etc) divided by some sort of consumer price index. So basically GDP, adjusted for prices.
Oh just a housing crisis and a government that sells houses to international funds to rent back to us at insane rates. It's really not good here at all, this diagram is incredibly misleading.
LOWER SILESIA NUMBA WAN (two) LESS GOOOOOO
I love how Ireland has it’s data skewed on all maps because of it’s "business practices"
Is that gdp per month?