ContentsEuropean regions
European regions
The map draws 11 Eurostat indicators for the 31 countries of the EU-27 and EFTA at up to four levels, from country to small region. Seven of them stop at the basic region (NUTS 2), and the map opens there on GDP per inhabitant in euros.
Change level, indicator, classification or palette
Level
Indicator
Classification and palette(Quantiles, Viridis)
Classification
Palette
Perceptually uniform. Colour-blind safe and greyscale-safe. The diverging palettes are off: they claim a meaningful centre, and none of these indicators has one.
GDP per inhabitant, 2022, in 244 of 260 basic regions
Cohesion policy sets structural-fund categories at this level, from GDP per inhabitant in purchasing power standards. It is also the finest level for survey-based indicators.
GDP per capita, 2022
5 equal-count bins, each shade holding about a fifth of the areas
No value: 16 of 260 basic regions, among them every EFTA region
Reading this map: Euros, not purchasing power standards. A euro buys more in Sofia than in Munich, and that distortion is left visible in the map rather than corrected inside it.
The United Kingdom left the NUTS system after Brexit and has no regions in the 2024 boundaries, so Britain shows only the basemap.
Eurostat nama_10r_3gdp: regional GDP at current market prices · reference year 2022 · boundaries: Eurostat GISCO, NUTS 2024 · © EuroGeographics for the administrative boundaries
Why some regions have no value
The city maps lose estimates as the geography gets finer, and on this map the finer levels lose whole indicators. Seven of the 11 indicators stop at the basic region (NUTS 2), including everything drawn from a sample survey. The four that reach the small regions (NUTS 3) are GDP per inhabitant in euros, median age, population and population density.
That is a different absence from suppression. A suppressed value was estimated and withheld; an unpublished level was never tabulated. The level buttons turn off where an indicator stops, because a blank map at that level would describe Eurostat’s table and invite a reading about the regions.
The United Kingdom is a third kind of absence. It left the NUTS system after Brexit, and NUTS 2024 has 1,971 region codes across 39 countries, none of them beginning UK. Great Britain and Northern Ireland therefore have no regions on these maps, which is why Ireland is coloured and the island beside it shows only the basemap. Eurostat publishes UK figures up to about 2019, so a 2023 map could only have shown an empty block.
The EU-27 and EFTA are on the map by editorial choice. Turkey and Serbia also report at these levels and are left out so that the comparison stays within one market and one policy regime. The four EFTA states have no value for GDP per inhabitant in euros in 2022, GDP per inhabitant in purchasing power standards in 2023 or disposable household income in 2022, the years these maps show, so those three maps cover the EU-27 only. Eurostat has Norway’s figures for earlier years, up to 2021 for GDP and 2020 for household income.
Cohesion policy sorts basic regions by GDP per inhabitant in purchasing power standards: below 75% of the EU-27 average a region counts as less developed, from 75% to 100% as in transition, and above 100% as more developed. In 2023, 82 of the 244 basic regions with a value were below 75, 71 were from 75 to under 100 and 91 were at 100 or more. The map puts a value on a threshold in the class above, so those 91 include the 3 regions at exactly 100, which the regulation counts as in transition. The 2021-2027 categories were set on 2015-2017 averages, so a region’s class on the 2023 map can differ from the category it is funded under.