Irish Households Lost The Most In The Financial Crisis

from Niall McCarthy

A report by the European Central Bank has revealed that Irish people lost more wealth than any other country inEurope during the financial crisis. In the four years up to and including 2013, the average net worth of Irish households fell €18,474. During the same period, average househeold net worth in Greece and Spain fell €16,909 and €12,780 respectively. As the Irish, Greeks, Spanish, Italians and Portuguese got poorer, other EU countries prospered. Dutch households had a per capita gain of over €33,000 for the four years to the start of 2015.



This chart shows household net worth across countries in the 4 years up to Q1 2015 (Euro per capita).

Source: Statista

The European Union – Politics and People

Starting with the electorate in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom today, voters all across the European Union are going to the polls to elect a new European Parliament(while most of the EU member states hold their vote on Sunday after which the results will be announced). Well, not all voters go to the polls: In 2009 the turnout at the European elections was at an all-time low of 43%. Whether the unusually passionate debate about this year’s election converts into a higher turnout remains to be seen. 

Undoubtedly these elections come at a critical point in the history of the European Union: With the financial crisis still having a high impact on many member states, and with far right and nationalist parties having gained ground at least in the public debates (and probably also in the forthcoming European Parliament), the few who do cast their vote will quite likely have a considerable impact onto the forthcoming European politics. The following series of cartograms shows Europe’s cartographic shapes in the current political climate. They were created for a contribution to the German Wirtschaftswoche magazine (see image above) in the buildup to the elections and show a mix of political, economic and population-related topics that form todays Europe:

(click for larger version)

The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig. You are free to use the material under Creative Commons conditions (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0); please contact me for further details. I also appreciate a message if you used my maps somewhere else. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.

Source: Views of the World

Growing old: European Population Pyramids

“A population pyramid, also called an age pyramid or age picture diagram, is a graphical illustration that shows the distribution of various age groups in a population (typically that of a country or region of the world), which forms the shape of a pyramid when the population is growing.” (Wikipedia)

This population pyramid shows the distribution of the 503 million men and women in the European Union (based on the EU27 countries in 2012) by different age cohorts. The shape can be described as a ‘constrictive pyramid’, which is typical of developed societies with low fertility and mortality rates and with relatively older populations. The population aged 15–65 years is 335 million, whereas nearly one fifth of the total population is over 65 years old. There are only 78 million children aged 0–15. The male:female ratio in the EU is 0.95.
When comparing the population pyramid for the whole of the EU with similar diagrams for separate countries in Europe in- and outside the European Union, it can be seen that in many states the pyramids look similar to that of the overall EU. However, the pyramids for Albania and to a lesser extent Turkey have a more ‘pyramid-like’ shape, suggesting either relatively higher outmigration rates in the recent past and/or a lower life expectancy. Fertility in these countries is not much higher than the EU average. On the other hand, Germany, the Netherlands and Andorra seem to have higher than average elderly populations. Other significant extremes show that Andorra has the highest male:female ratio, while Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia have the lowest ratios. The following overview shows, how all European countries compare in their demographic structure:

(click for larger version)

The overall trend of demographic change is that of an ageing continent. The region with the largest percentage (27%) is Liguria in Italy. The elderly of Europe are also found in greater than normal proportions in northern Germany, and also along the Mediterranean coast and in the interior of France, in northern Spain and southwest England. A lot of these regions are typically attractive for retired people and may also be characterised by low fertility rates. The following map shows the regional distribution of the shares of elderly across Europe displayed on a gridded population cartogram where each of the grid cells is resized to the total number of people living there:

(click for larger version)

While Europe is getting older, there are the increasingly smaller numbers of children that will have to bear the burden of the slowly ageing societies. But there are stark geographical differences in their spatial distribution, as the following map of the proportion of children in an area demonstrates:

(click for larger version)

This gridded population cartogram of Europe shows that the region with the lowest proportion of children as a share of its total population is Principado de Asturias in northwest Spain, where 10.8% of the population is aged 0–15. Other areas with very small percentages (all below 12%) include the German regions of Schleswig-Holstein, Saarland and Thüringen, and the Italian region of Liguria. The region with the highest proportion (40.9%) of its population aged 0–15 is Mardin in Turkey (which is also the region with the lowest percentage of working-age population). Many of the regions with high child populations are in Turkey. The top 15 regions (including Mardin) are all in Turkey, all with over 25% of their populations being children. The next largest area that is not located in Turkey is the region of Border, Midlands and Western in the Republic of Ireland, where 22.4% of the population is aged 0–15.

If you want to find out more about how useful population pyramids as a visualisation tool can be, the following TED talk provides an interesting insight. “Population statistics“, as the related introduction explains, “are like crystal balls — when examined closely, they can help predict a country’s future (and give important clues about the past). Kim Preshoff explains how using a visual tool called a population pyramid helps policymakers and social scientists make sense of the statistics, using three different countries’ pyramids as examples.“



The Social Atlas of Europe
by Dimitris Ballas, Danny Dorling, Benjamin Hennig

Published by Policy Press
[Oder your copy here]

The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig. You are free use to the material for non-commercial purposes under Creative Commons conditions (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0); please contact me for further details. I also appreciate a message if you used my maps somewhere else. High resolution and customized visualisations are available on request.

Source: Views of the World

Asylum seekers in Europe

2,500 people are believed to have died or gone missing on their way to Europe this year already, according to estimates by UNHCR. But it was the image of a young boy found dead on the shores of Turkey which changed the tone in the debate about the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe. While the response to the crisis varies strongly, Campaign groups are calling for a European-wide approach to the crisis. While Germany suspendedthe Dublin regulation to allow regugees into the country and claim asylum regardless of where they entered the European Union, the country also calls for a more equitable system of sharing refugees across the EU similar to Germany’s domestic approach of distributing refugees.
The following cartogram shows the current situation in Europe using Eurostat’s latest statistics about the number of asylum applicants in each country. The data covers the first half of 2015 (January to June) and adds up to 417,430 officially recorded claims in that period in the EU member states. The following map also includes those European countries which are not member of the European Union but part of the Schengen area and it shows each country resized according to the absolute number of asylum applications in that country from January to June 2015:

(click for larger version)

Also included in this cartogram is a reference map that shows the population distribution in Europe – which differs significantly from the main map. In 2014, Germany had the largest absolute number of asylum seekers (as also shown in the map below) in Europe (more than 200,000 compared to over 80,000 of second-ranked Sweden), while the relative distribution saw Sweden on top with 8,365 asylum applicants per 1 million population (Germany: 2,513), Hungary coming second with 4,337 asylum applicants per 1 million population not least due to its geographic location on some of the most frequently usedmigration routes into Europe. Other populous countries saw much lower figures, such as 972 asylum applicants per 1 million population in France and 494 asylum applicants per 1 million population in the UK.
Last year EU countries offered asylum to 184,665 refugees, while according to Eurostatmore than 570,000 migrants applied for asylum. This is a map the situation in 2014, showing the distribution of asylum applicants in Europe:

(click for larger version)

To put these numbers into perspective, the number of refugees heading for Europe is small compared to the global picture that UNHCR published in its Global refugee trendsearlier this year: Around the world, almost 60 million have been displaced by conflict and persecution last year. Nearly 20 million of them are refugees. Lebanon alone houses far more than a million Syrian refugees, a number that is higher than the whole number of refugees expected to arrive in all European nations put together.
While European leaders fail to find a joint – and humane – approach, citizen have started to take action, such as an internet platform dubbed as AirBNB for refugees in Germanyand a Facebook campaign in Iceland where “more than 11,000 families in Iceland have offered to open their homes to Syrian refugees in a bid to raise the government’s cap of just 50 asylum seekers a year”.

More migration-related maps from this website can be found here:

• Global refugee trends: showing countries or origin and destination as documented in the most recent UNHCR report
• Migrants at Sea: A look at where Mediterranean refugees arrived in Europe between 2006 and 2014
• Displaced lifes: Internally displaced people

The colours in the above maps are using a colour scheme developed for the Social Atlas of Europe. Each country shown has a unique colour which allows it to be identified in the differently distorted maps. Furthermore, all countries in these maps are shaded using a rainbow colour scheme, starting with shades of dark red to demarcate the countries with the most recent association with the EU and moving through to a shade of violet for the oldest member states.



The Social Atlas of Europe
by Dimitris Ballas, Danny Dorling, Benjamin Hennig

Published by Policy Press
[Oder your copy here]

The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig using data by Eurostat. Please contact me for further details on the terms of use.

Source: Views of the World