The real value of 100 € in Europe
on real purchasing power across Europe
Inspired by this map about the real value of 100$ in US, I decided to bring back some of R reminiscences and to do a similar exercise for Europe (formally: the 28 EU Member States, 3 member states of the EFTA, five candidate countries and one Western Balkan country).
What are the purchasing power differences within some European countries?
The values have been computed adjusting the value of 100 € to the Purchasing power parities (PPPs) indexes for each mapped country.
PPPs are indicators of price level differences across countries. They indicate how many currency units a particular quantity of goods and services costs in different countries.
No big surprises here: eastern european countries like Romania or Poland have a much bigger purchasing power compared to northern countries like the United Kingdom or Norway.
But if we look on how things changed between 2005 and 2015, we might find something interesting: UK and Iceland are the only two western countries where the purchasing power significantly changed.
UK purchasing power dropped by 14.83 points while Iceland increased by 14.85.
Retail prices might have dropped in Iceland as a consequence of the recent financial crisis, but what about the UK? What happened in the last 10 years?
For R code and raw data check out my github repo.
