Saturday, August 18, 2012

Catch me if you can

LeBron links to a study claiming the economic benefits of the single currency accrued mainly to Greece, Portugal & Spain.

I decided to look at the issue through the lens of real per-capita GDP via Angus Maddison's dataset and take a longer view than just the post-euro period.

Here's what I found (clic the pic for an even more wonkish image):



Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Greece were all growing fast relative to Germany (and France which is not on the graph) well before the introduction of the Euro. Ireland and Spain take off somewhere around 1990 and the intro of the Euro in 2000 does not speed up their trajectory. Portugal actually falls further behind Germany in the Euro era. Greece is the only country of these 5 whose catch-up to Germany accelerates with the intro of the Euro.

The data used can be found here.

It is also interesting to note that Greece, Portugal & Spain surged relative to Germany from 1960 - 1974, then stagnated till the end of the 1980s.

2 comments:

Mo Bradley said...

I definitely wanted to write down a brief message in order to say thank you for all of the magnificent guidelines you are sharing here. My extended internet lookup has finally been compensated with beneficial content to write about with my company. I would suppose that many of us visitors are really blessed to be in a remarkable network place with so many outstanding individuals with useful hints. I feel truly happy to have seen the site and look forward to tons of more awesome moments reading here. Thank you again for everything.

Parking enforcement said...

Yes It's hard to catch you!!:p