[RD] Daily Graphs and Charts

[SS-18 ICBM]

Greece is kinda lonely there.

 

[Takhisis]

They also have Cyprus on their side, but after the 1950s the Middle East Greeks were either deported or killed… we'd be able to count Alexandria in otherwise.

 

[Monsterzuma]

Major linguistic-cultural circles of Europe (Slavic, Romance, Germanic, etc.):

http://postimg.org/image/rvywh6glr/full/

it's crazy how well these lines match up with the major lines dividing the economic success of nations.

 

[Domen]

Iron Curtain and Communism match better, though:

But someone confused West with East in this map.

 

[Traitorfish]

They placed Yugoslavia in the Eastern Bloc and Finland in the Western Bloc, so I'd say the confusion runs deeper than that.

 

[Domen]

Yugoslavia and Albania were Communist, even though both of them divorced with Stalin.

Finland was not Communist.

Main economic activity of Albania during the Communist regime was building pillboxes.

 

[Traitorfish]

"Eastern Bloc" and "Western Bloc" does not mean "Communist" and "non-Communist". That's really basic stuff.

 

[Domen]

I wrote: "Iron Curtain and Communism match better, though."

Where did I even mention "Eastern Bloc" ???

 

[Traitorfish]

The map uses the keys "Eastern Bloc" and "Western Bloc". That's what I was getting at.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

All Spain was an iron courtain!

 

[Domen]

Ah, OK. Anyway, Communist economies were in a relative decline compared to Capitalist economies:

GDP per capita in Poland compared to Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain in period 1950 - 2010:

Polska/Hiszpania - Polish GDP per capita as % of Spanish GDP per capita
Polska/Portugalia - as % of Portuguese
Polska/Grecja - as % of Greek
Polska/Włochy - as % of Italian

Odsetek - percent
Lata - years

As you can see in 1950 Poland was richer in terms of GDP per capita than Spain, Portugal and Greece.

Despite the fact that it was just 5 years after the end of WW2, during which Poland suffered more devastation than any other country.

All Spain was an iron courtain!

Franco.

 

[luiz]

it's crazy how well these lines match up with the major lines dividing the economic success of nations.

France is quite wealthy, as is Northern Italy.

 

[Domen]

In France average wage is higher than in Germany, Holland, Austria, etc.

GDP per capita of Ireland is higher than Germany, UK or Denmark.

East Germany is still quite poor despite 25 years of convergence attempts.

Of course West Berlin was not part of East Germany.

Norway only became rich after it started extracting resoruces from the North Sea.

 

[Monsterzuma]

Ireland's GDP was inflated by its property bubbles & financial gimmicking. It's widely known as an economic basket case now.

France's wages are a matter of distribution more than of productivity; overall GDP is obviously the more relevant measure.

Italy narrowly escaped financial collapse just 2 years ago and is far from out of the woods; anyone can be "wealthy" by borrowing beyond their ability to service debt.

With a bit of effort you'd find as many instances confirming the trend in an exaggerated way as you'd find "exceptions" like these. Net-net the correlation holds.

 

[Domen]

The most dynamically developing economy of Europe during the last 20 years has been Poland (at least when it comes to EU members):

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=13194885&postcount=72

As for East Germany / West Germany contrasts, I already posted stuff about this here:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=13205868&postcount=4617

Ireland's GDP was inflated by its property bubbles & financial gimmicking. It's widely known as an economic basket case now.

GDP per capita estimates tend to be somehow unreliable.

I collected data on GDP (PPP) per capita from 6 different sources (all refer to most recent years) and this is what I got:

And here is a map based on this data from 6 sources posted above (sorry that colours in some cases don't match):

In some cases as you can see various data differ considerably.

For example in case of GDP per capita in Russia, there are huge differences between sources (lowest estimate: 17884 / highest estimate: 23589).

 

[luiz]

Ireland's GDP was inflated by its property bubbles & financial gimmicking. It's widely known as an economic basket case now.

France's wages are a matter of distribution more than of productivity; overall GDP is obviously the more relevant measure.

Italy narrowly escaped financial collapse just 2 years ago and is far from out of the woods; anyone can be "wealthy" by borrowing beyond their ability to service debt.

With a bit of effort you'd find as many instances confirming the trend in an exaggerated way as you'd find "exceptions" like these. Net-net the correlation holds.

Even after the crisis Ireland is still one of the wealthiest countries on Earth. And it's recovering better than most.

France's per capita GDP is equivalent to that of the UK. Under no metric is it a poor country even by Western European standards.

The Italian state is a financial mess, but that doesn't change the fact that Italy, specially Northern Italy, is a very rich country. In Northern Italy worker productivity is not really different from Germany, and the people aren't any poorer.

And then you also have Austria and Belgium and large parts of Switzerland who, despite being "Germanic", are historically Catholic and thus more influenced by Latin culture, and are all some of the richest countries on Earth.

 

[Domen]

Belgium is rather mixed, below 60% Flemish and over 40% Walloon (Romance). Capital city (Brussels) is mostly Walloon.

Switzerland is also mixed German-French-Italian, although here a bigger majority speaks German.

The map I posted is accurate only on country level (this is why for example I did not mark any regions as having Basque majority, etc.).

It has regional level accuracy in case of Belgium and Switzerland, due to very mixed character of these two countries.

 

[Monsterzuma]

Even after the crisis Ireland is still one of the wealthiest countries on Earth. And it's recovering better than most.

France's per capita GDP is equivalent to that of the UK. Under no metric is it a poor country even by Western European standards.

The Italian state is a financial mess, but that doesn't change the fact that Italy, specially Northern Italy, is a very rich country. In Northern Italy worker productivity is not really different from Germany, and the people aren't any poorer.

And then you also have Austria and Belgium and large parts of Switzerland who, despite being "Germanic", are historically Catholic and thus more influenced by Latin culture, and are all some of the richest countries on Earth.

Ireland: since the 2008 crisis, the public debt of this country has grown from 25% to now 120% of GDP. if this is an example of a strong recovery I'm at a loss to conceive of what a weak one looks like.

Italy: Italy is composed of more than just its Northern part; if you handpick sub-regions to argue a point you can do it to argue the opposing case just as easily.

France: it's also not wealthy enough to buck the trend significantly.

Austria, Belgium, Switzerland: this never was about catholicism

 

[Domen]

Interesting article:

http://www.voxeu.org/article/are-germans-really-poorer-spaniards-italians-and-greeks

There does seem to be a problem of the distribution of wealth in Germany:

a) First, wealth in Germany is highly concentrated in the upper part of the household-income distribution.

b) Second, a large part of German wealth is not held by households and therefore must be held by the corporate sector or the government.

 

[El_Machinae]