The rich heart of Europe

The mountains were traditionally the poor areas too.

And, in the more detailed graph, why is the South-West of Ireland so rich? Dublin is on the east coast of Ireland.

If someone asks why the south-west littoral of Portugal is relatively rich (in the detailed map), it is the result of an oil refinery and a very small population.

And, needless to say, with experience in trade comes experience in specialization and experience in exercising comparative advantage.

One relevant factor may be that interior mountainous regions get fewer poor immigrants, who might tend to drag down the numbers in coastal urban areas.

Also, areas with less fertile land, more mountainous, likely have a larger incentive to excel at industry. Much like rocky New England vs. the fertile southeast US. Originally the latter was more prosperous, until industry surpassed agriculture in importance and New England superseded it.

The map at the top has a bright green dot on Bucharest, suggesting that it’s richer than most of Scandinavia, all of France except Paris and most of the UK. There’s no way that’s correct.

My take is that most commenters are overthinking this in trying to make correlations with culture.

Truth is the Alpine region is sparsely populated while receiving a huge inflow of tourism every year. If Wikipedia numbers are anything to go by there are around 120m tourists per year and 14m inhabitants, which would mean roughly 9 spending visitors per inhabitant every year.

Add to that that the Alpine region is not exactly a spot for frugal travelers (mountain skiing is still a luxury reserved to a relatively small elite) + the tourist/inhabitant ratio would be higher in the more popular areas.

Tracy, the south-west region include Cork and Limerick cities. Checking Ireland’s Central Statistics Office for income per person I see that the top four counties are:

Dublin
Limerick
Kildare (a commuter county beside Dublin)
Cork

So that seems to explain it; the wealth clusters around the urban centres.

Actually Eurostat have some fantastic maps showing a whole host of variables:
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistical-atlas/gis/viewer/

Some commentators have suggested there are few immigrants in these wealthy-looking areas. Eurostat have this map showing the percentage of the population born in a foreign country. If anything it seems that these wealthy-looking areas also have disproportionately high percentages of foreign citizens. Of course many of these citizens could be from other wealthy EU countries:
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/7116161/7188977/0201EN.pdf

The employment rate is also highest around the Swiss/South German region:
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/7116161/7188977/0501EN.pdf

You might be over-thinking it. This rich area could be contiguous just by chance.

Southern Germany is richer than northern Germany because it is more conservative and was therefore ruled more by the more business-friendly CDU/CSU rather than the more left-leaning SPD.
Switzerland is rich, because it is very well-governed. (I’m not going to make a guess why that is exactly.)
Western Austria and the smaller North-Italian areas are relatively sparsely populated, but get a lot of profitable wintersport-tourism.
Northern Italy is very different culturally from southern Italy. It’s a small miracle that they were able to unify at all. Also very differently governed.

These are all guesses.

I don’t think it’s necessary to postulate some kind of alpine specialness.
Northern Italy was always quite wealthy compared to its surroundings, but the other areas not until recently.

Italy of course has a reputation for being corrupt and badly governed but how much of that is southern Italy bringing it down? If they split off in to two countries, would North Italy have the same stereotype? Or would it be considered similar to Switzerland, Austria and Germany?

Maybe inequality is stronger between regional areas in a globalized world so London and Paris are much richer than the surrounding regions. Those mountainous areas aren’t as globalized so the wealth is more spread out.

Might it be that mountain communities tend not to be heavily contested in wartime? I don’t think anyone bothered to systemically bomb the heck out of the Alps in any of the last couple of centuries’ wars, though my military history might be wrong.

I think that, in the detailed map, the rich Alps largely disappear as a separate entity – what we have is a rich strip, almost contiguous, from northern Italy to Netherlands.

Btw, the fact that Switzerland count as only one geographical unit could be creating some kind of visual illusion there (if Geneva and Appenzell had different colors, perhaps the rich area will not seems so contiguous?)

In the UK, France, and Spain – historically politically centralised states – wealth is centralised near the capital.

Bavaria, Switzerland, Lombardy–Venetia, and Piedmont were each political centres in their own right, so wealth is more spread out.

If you were to plot the same data with area scaling with population, you would probably find that this concentration is less remarkable. Neither Italy nor Germany have population concentrations comparable to London or Paris.

As someone living in Milan I feel compelled to correct the americans on their geography (I would probably make similar mistakes about lots of places in the US):
– the area we are talking about contains not only alps but a large amount of plains (north and south of the apls)
– lombardy can hardly be described as sparsely populated (on the opposite, it’s probably the most densely populated region in Italy) and tourism plays a pretty small part in its economy
– most of the area from Lombardy to Bavaria including Switzerland and Austria is catholic
– the rich parts of Germany and Italy are pretty much as far away from Rome and Berlin (the respective capitals) as you can get in Italy and Germany

That rich part that is identified as being around the ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam is larger than that and included Amsterdam and Brussels. That has long been the richest and most densely populated core of Europe and still is.

I certainly don’t think it is the mountains themselves. Otherwise why is it that mountainous regions in Asia, South America, and North America all tend to correspond with the poorest areas? I think Scott’s first comment about mountainous and landlocked areas being the poorest is the general case, and Europe is the exception.

The best rationale I’ve seen in the comments is that it is the influence of the Swiss. I suspect it is a cultural thing after all. Scott’s comments about the culture of Italy, etc. are red herrings because culture can be different in different areas of a country.

As people note on Razib’s blog, this is not really a new observation. The “blue banana” was discussed a lot a few years ago. I think there is a bit of an illusion that there is continuous development caused by differing sizes of political units, so the alps, which are very sparsely populated but rich looks on this kind of coloured map a similar significance as say to heavily populated but much smaller area Paris. A better way of looking at this is probably night time satellite images, which gives you an idea of the density of development. You can see on satellite images that there are really three clusters, one in Northern Italy, one clustered around the Netherlands/Belgium and Northern Germany, and then one in the UK connecting London with Manchester. Of course you can draw a curved line between any three dots and then make up a narrative about it, but trying to do that scientifically risks a lot of “just so” explanations like we see above. The boring answer is that these are three extra highly developed areas that would naturally occur in a highly developed part of the world. The Pearl River example is another one of these areas, along with the Washington/Boston and San Antonio-Houston-Dallas corridors. In these latter examples we can perhaps more easily see the path dependence on the shape of these corridors.

There are several things to say:

1) The regions are not always well defined. For instance Prague (capital of Czech Republic) with 173% of average regional GDP per Capita in is considered #9 and region of Bratislava (capital of Slovakia) with 186% is #6

These statistics are not precise mostly because they do not count commuters. An egregious example is “Inner London” region that has a population of around 3 million but concentrates a lot of jobs and companies

2) The colors themselves are not nuanced enoguh. To take Austria as an example for instance the Region Oberösterreich has GDP per capita in PPP of EUR 30,800 and is dark green while neighboring region of Steiermark with GDP per Capita of EUR 27,000 is lighter green and finally another region of Kärnten with GDP per Capita of EUR 26,200 is the lightest green.

Meanwhile on the upper side there can be incredible difference between Inner London with EUR 80,000 and the Oberösterreich with EUR 30,800.

3) The conclusion for me is that in reality you should not make much difference between various shades of green. It will contain very rich regions like inner London or Hamburg that kind of artificially attract disproportional share of income from neighbouring regions together with fairly developed urban regions.

So if you look at the as green vs red the best explanation is so called “Blue Banana” belt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana

It is a corridor of highest level of urbanization and therefore with developed capital. There are interesting historical reasons why this belt developed the way it did that go beyond simple comment.

Robert Thorpe: I think the whole mountain angle is a little bit overblown. Take a look at the terrain map of Europe: http://www.graphatlas.com/europe_map_relief_with_rivers.jpg

The only fully mountain regions are Austrian regions of Tyrol, Voralberg and Salzburg and Italian Trentino-Alto (South Tyrol). By the way the total population of these regions is around 2,5 million.

Other dark green regions that contain majority of population in that particular location Scott mentions such as Bavaria or Lombardy are actually quite flat – at least that is where most of the population lives. This even applies locally let’s say in Switzerland where the rich and populous northern cantons such as Zurich are much richer than the mountain southern cantons like Ticino. Again there are exemptions but in general the trend holds.

So I would say that the general patern of how to predict rich region is this: a region with long history of urbanization and industrialization. Exception are some highly developed mountain regions that serve as good vacation home for nearby urban population.

> I think the whole mountain angle is a little bit overblown.

I see what you mean.

There’s no way Western France or large swathes of Spain are so poor. Looks like an attempt to squeeze subsidies out of the EU by French and Spanish farmers.