There are 27 countries in the European Union and out of those only 17 countries use the Euro. All these countries have to approve the new Euro bailout fund, and Slovakia which was the last country to ratify the measure rejected it today. They are going to vote on it again this week, and are expected to approve it with some changes.
Sometime last week I had Tweeted out how strange it was that countries that are poorer than Greece will pass a bailout that will help a richer country, and I casually started looking at the various countries that use the Euro and their per capita GDP. There’s quite a big range there with Luxembourg which is the richest country having a per capita GDP of $108,952 (highest in the world) and Estonia with a per capita GDP of only $ 14,405.
Chartsbin allows you to see this data on a nice interactive Europe map, and here is how that visualization looks like.
via chartsbin.com
Looking at this map brings several things to mind – the first of which being – where the heck is Malta?
I took a really long time to locate Malta, and that’s a tiny dot in the Mediterranean just south of Italy, you will have to hover your cursor a few times there before identifying it if you don’t already know where to look for it.
Switzerland makes a nice little colorless space surrounded by France, Germany and Italy, and its only a couple of months ago that I learned that Switzerland is not part of the European Union at all. You keep hearing about Swiss Francs so you think that they aren’t part of the Eurozone, but they aren’t part of EU either.
CNN ran a map of the debt level of several European countries some time ago, and that also showed quite a range, and a lot of countries with debt level of over 60%.
Here is the data used to create this chart in a tabular form.
| Country | Per Capita GDP |
| Luxembourg | 108952 |
| Netherlands | 46986 |
| Ireland | 46298 |
| Austria | 44988 |
| Finland | 44496 |
| Belgium | 42845 |
| France | 40704 |
| Germany | 40274 |
| Italy | 34059 |
| Spain | 30639 |
| Cyprus | 28854 |
| Greece | 27311 |
| Slovenia | 23648 |
| Portugal | 21542 |
| Malta | 19707 |
| Slovakia | 16104 |
| Estonia | 14405 |
Europe has many economic disparities between itself. Economic co-operation is challenging and if the countries have the same currency, it makes their monetary policy defunct. So individual governments will have fewer tools in its hand to stimulate the development. So there is a bigger chance that the rich countries get richer and the poor get poorer.