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.
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.
Many things are missing from this picture. It uses mean not median income, which would do a better job of telling how widespread the increase is. It uses a basic inflation adjustment which doesn’t differentiate between luxury goods and services vs basic necessities. In other words it’s hard to tell to what degree this rise has benefited people in general.
Hours worked for full time employees in EU apparently has been falling year over year since at least 2013. Maybe it has increased for part timers though?
Not sure how to square that with the fact that there’s been low productivity growth since 2008.
In the higher income countries the hours worked have fallen, however it may be that in lower income countries they have increased.
That is to say, due to more work opportunities more people have gotten jobs that count towards measured work hours and GDP. Including households who used to have one person working jobs that count towards metrics now have two.
I don’t have numbers for this though, just an informed guess.
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.
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.
A few countries have done spectacularly well, but others have done incredibly badly (two have an actual decline over a 20 year period!).
Not sure how to square that with the fact that there’s been low productivity growth since 2008.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser and either search or use data code tps00071
That is to say, due to more work opportunities more people have gotten jobs that count towards measured work hours and GDP. Including households who used to have one person working jobs that count towards metrics now have two.
I don’t have numbers for this though, just an informed guess.