ONS Interactive Content

Just a quick post this time. Came across the interactive data sets that the ONS seem to be pushing quite a lot on their home page.

Some of them are excellent and very interesting. I particularly liked their flow maps. There are two that are quite interesting:

1. Internal migration - where do people move to within the England and Wales.
2. UK trade in services - how much is being exported and where to (within the EU).

I did something similar in Java recently whilst working on some Spanish data. What I did only shows distribution of data within the regions of Spain so not quite as flashy. I'll write it up soon, although it may take a while.

The interactive content on the ONS website is split into several sections including the recent census, economy, the labour market, people and places, population and migration and education.

All very exciting.

European GDP Statistics

Much is written about GDP in Europe these days. So I thought I'd have a look and see what the actual figures are and what has changed in them over the last few years.

I obtained the figures from Eurostat. The figures in question were the GDP per capita figures and the GDP figures were from the 'nama_gdp_c' data set.

The first chart below shows the average relative GDP for separate European countries from 2000 to 2014 (forecasted) indexed on Germany.

I then looked at the growth in GDP for each of the top 5 countries by indexing the GDP for each year on the GDP for 2000.

As you can see, the UK has shown the largest relative drop, although it seems to be growing fairly well since 2009. It's still not back at the levels it was at in 2007 though. The other 4 countries show a small decline in 2009.

The third chart shows the GDP per capita in PPS. To quote Eurostat:

Gross domestic product (GDP) is a measure for the economic activity. It is defined as the value of all goods and services produced less the value of any goods or services used in their creation. The volume index of GDP per capita in Purchasing Power Standards (PPS) is expressed in relation to the European Union (EU27) average set to equal 100. If the index of a country is higher than 100, this country's level of GDP per head is higher than the EU average and vice versa. Basic figures are expressed in PPS, i.e. a common currency that eliminates the differences in price levels between countries allowing meaningful volume comparisons of GDP between countries. Please note that the index, calculated from PPS figures and expressed with respect to EU27 = 100, is intended for cross-country comparisons rather than for temporal comparisons.

Therefore it shows the GDP per capita in PPS relative to the EU as a whole.

On this measure Italy has dropped the most, closely followed by the UK. Germany has actually grown. But remember these figures are relative to the EU. Therefore even if Germany looks like it's growing, on this measure, it's only against the rest of Europe.

Anyway, of the 5 big EU countries, the UK seems to be doing quite badly.