HN Reader

Poorer countries like Romania and Poland benefited more than richer countries like Austria and Luxemburg (exception were intermediate countries like Greece and Italy that piled on too much debt).

This was planned (called EU convergence), and is a victory of bureaucratic planning. Whatever you think of the goals or methods, I think it's awe inspiring that an organization can plan and follow through with a plan on multi-decade time horizon.

The U.S. is up 39% since that time: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A229RX0 [EDIT: Didn’t see it was disposable real income per capita. That figure is 39% not 30%.][1]

The only countries that outperformed the U.S. were former soviet-aligned countries, Malta, and Iceland.

[1] I don’t know if the Fed disposable income calculation accounts for everything the EU calculation does, specifically the value of free services. European growth could be higher if their welfare states and tax burdens have gotten relatively larger during this time.

This is measuring household not individual... Needs context then... How did average working hours per household change during that period?

Meanwhile ... Inflation from 2004 to 2025

Cumulative price change 57.20% Average inflation rate 2.18%

https://www.in2013dollars.com/europe/inflation/2004?amount=1...

That is pretty disastrous. 22% over 20 years is 1% per year.

A few countries have done spectacularly well, but others have done incredibly badly (two have an actual decline over a 20 year period!).

hah. Bulgaria does not count i guess. Even if same timing/trajectory as Romania. Too much cyrillics maybe.

It's kind of weird that Romania has done so well, given that amount of turmoil in Romanian politics and Romania in general in the last 20 years.

Basically, it went up for Romania because they got access to the EU market (in terms of both exports and remittances) starting in 2007 and that helped, _despite_ everything else that went on. So.. kind of a win for Romania and the EU, I guess.

Since 2004?? If anything, it's a terrible statistic.

Meanwhile, since 2010:

> House prices across the EU have soared by 48% between 2010 and 2023, according to Eurostat, while rents increased 22% over the same period. By 2023, nearly one in 10 people were spending 40% or more of their disposable income on housing, including 29% of the population in Greece, 15% in Denmark and 13% in Germany.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/dec/15/europe-housi... (Published Mon 15 Dec 2025)

More granular breakdowns, e.g. per income percentile and sector would be useful.

How much of this is convergence due to the addition of much poorer Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe - especially because this is "per capita"?

Edit: looking at the source dataset, it is just convergent growth from Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe. Those EU countries that were already developed countries in the 2000s grew well below the average excluding Ireland, Sweden, and Germany.

Strange just how much inequality exists within the EU ... WTF.