With all the discussions going on around the Greek referendum, I got curious on how important membership of either the Eurozone or just the EU actually is. Most measures focus on simple GDP growth, but this disregards the actual wealth of people in the long run. Just taking GDP per-capita has also drawbacks (it doesn't take into account purchasing power or inequality). Anyway, I took GDP per-capita in US-Dollars. It's easy to find in the OECD database and reasonable enough as a proxy for people's general wealth. I went 20 years back and calculated the per-capita growth rates of the European countries available and the US. The chart below shows these 20-year growth rates and also the final level of GDP per-capita in 2014.
For me, there were some surprising results. In my perception Switzerland was much more successful in the past 20 years without being in the EU (virtually no difference to its comparable neighbour Austria). The ones staying consciously outside of the EU (Norway, Iceland, Switzerland) don't seem to have done necessarily much better (Norway did of course, but that can be mainly explained by its oil-wealth). Similarly, Denmark, Sweden and the United Kingdom don't seem to be doing better than the rest who introduced the Euro from the beginning. Obviously, this is a very crude analysis and you need to look further into a lot of factors to come to a definite conclusion, but I think the chart is nevertheless interesting.
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| Source: OECD |
