Greece Outside In: Eurozone debt crisis: the key charts you need to understand what's happening

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Eurozone debt crisis: the key charts you need to understand what's happening

Europe is in crisis - but what's going on? Which are the right key numbers to compare each country?
• Get the data

How bad are things in Europe - and how does each country compare?

This week has seen anti-austerity strikes and protests across Southern Europe, with Greece, Italy and Spain all hit by disturbances.

In Europe's largest ever coordinated industrial action, tens of thousands of workers took to the streets on Wednesday after the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) issued a statement that austerity is "dragging Europe into economic stagnation, indeed recession".

Having rallied the previous day, markets across Europe fell on Wednesday, with the FTSE 100, Dax (Germany), Cac (France) and Ibex (Spain) all closing down.

We wanted to see which key indicators are the best for comparing Europe and might help us understand what's going on a little better. The best source for this info is Eurostat. You can download the full data below. What would you add?

1. Government debt

These are the big scary numbers - although it's still regularly mixed up with the deficit (see below) by journalists and politicians alike. As a whole, Europe owes €10,840,197,700,000 - or €10.84 trillion. But it's more meaningful to look at the number as a percent of gross domestic product, or GDP. So, we want to see how much that debt is as a proportion of the whole economy - kind of equivalent to measuring your mortgage compared to the whole economic value of your household. That gives us a European average of 84.9% in the second three months of this year - up from 83.4% in the first quarter. But that figure hides a lot of variation: Greece, at the top, owes 144.3%, up from 132.3% (although it has seen big GDP drops over the same period), followed by Italy at 126.1%. The UK is just above average at 86%. There's nothing inherently bad about having a huge debt - it depends who you owe it to and whether you can manage the payments. Bigger countries are also in a better position: essentially, if you owe the bank £50,000, you've got a problem; if you owe the bank £50,000,000, the bank's got a problem.

2. Deficits

If the gross debt is equivalent to your mortgage, the deficit is the overdraft, the running gap between your outgoings and ingoings. Big deficits mean more borrowing, and then running it up all over again to cover the costs of that borrowing.

Again, the best way to look at these is as a percentage of GDP, and Eurstat shows which countries are worst affected, this time from the end of 2011, which is the latest available data. It shows Ireland had the worst deficit then at 13.4% followed by Greece and Spain, both at 9.4%. Compare that to Germany at 0.8% and you can see the relative strengths of the economies.

3. Are we still in recession?

If you look at changes in GDP - these figures are from the OECD - it does show things have improved considerably since early 2009, although growth rates have hovered around zero in the last couple of years. Last month, of course, we learned that the UK had climbed out of recession.

4. Bond yields

The way governments borrow money is by selling bonds - the interest rate, or "yield", is set when the debt is auctioned. This matters because as a country the higher the rate you have to sell your bonds at, the more you'll have to pay back. In short, the lower the figure the better. As you can see from the chart below, the UK, outside the Euro, is benefiting from being a safe haven. At the other end of the spectrum, Greece and Portugal are considered less safe than Romania and Cyprus.

5. Unemployment

It might not even be part of the agenda at the summit this week, but unemployment is the indicator with the most direct impact on real people's lives of those here. Traditionally, when there's a recession, unemployment lags behind - ie, it goes up at the end of the recession and takes a while to come down again. This recession has not seen huge changes in overall unemployment yet, although the last year has seen a gradual rise.

Youth unemployment has gone up too - but the percentages are even more striking: 54.2% of 15-24-year-olds in Spain are unemployed, for instance.