Poorest country in Europe

[topum]

We are currently visiting Moldova. It is the poorest country in Europe (GDP per capita). The second poorest is Ukraine and the gap even between Ukraine and Moldova is still huge, Ukraine is more than two times richer than Moldova. Moldova is a real outlier in Europe. Albania, Kosovo and Bosnia are also more then twice as rich as Moldova. Romania and Bulgaria are almost four times richer than Moldova.



Moldova is almost fifteen times poorer than Norway (where my mother is from), which is the richest country in Europe, not considering the off-shorey micro-nations of Monaco, Lichtenstein and Luxembourg. Almost fourteen/thirteen times poorer than US/Canada and almost ten times poorer than Denmark (where my dad is from). Here are the twelve richest countries in Europe.



More than half of Moldovans (the "Romanian part") are EU citizens. Their grandparents were stripped of their Romanian citizenship after Moldova was annexed by Russia after WWII and Romania gave them their citizenship back after the iron curtain fell. They can work and live legally anywhere in the EU, which many of them do. Almost every family has one or two members working abroad. Italy, Greece, Ireland, France and Germany are the most popular choices. Spain and Portugal used to be popular choices too but are much less so in the last couple of years. Our host worked as an audit manager at Deloitte in London for a couple of years.

Many Moldovan kids live with their parents abroad and go to school in Italy, England, France and come over to visit their grandparents during the summer holidays. They speak Romanian with their grandparents and their parents but Italian, French, English, etc between themselves. It is really funny to see a Moldovan barefoot kid looking after the sheep in a Moldovan village breaking out into a thick Scottish accent all of a sudden.

The majority of those who are not EU citizens are Russians and Ukrainians and they usually have Russian passports and a lot of them work in Moscow, St Petersburg and elsewhere in Russia, which is almost five times richer than Moldova. There are also quite a lot of Moldovan Jews in the capital who have Israeli passports but live and do business in Moldova.

Comments

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Oh, that is interesting! I had not realised that GDP was so very low for Moldova. Presumably, as so many Moldovans work abroad, their income and the money they send into the country is not counted towards the GDP figure, so it appears artificially low.

Aren't the Irish doing well still? I had no idea they had bounced back so well from the crash. I guess that's what being Google's european base does for you, when you have a relatively tiny population...

It's interesting to contrast GDP adjusted for purchasing power, where the Nordic countries are much further down the list due to high prices : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)

[bunn.livejournal.com]

... my husband, who has an economics degree, floated past while I was commenting and said 'yes, all the versions of GDP are kind of flawed but you have to use *something*...'

[topum.livejournal.com]

All of these lists are flawed of course (you still need something that is practical to calculate) but i think this list is completely meaningless for anyone except perhaps the economists. Vietnam above Switzerland, Pakistan above the Netherlands, Indonesia above the UK and Kazakhstan way above Norway is really really hard to see.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I think it's interesting perspective, if you consider the main GDP tables as well: on its own, it's a bit loony looking, yes. But I think it's true that you could live for a long time very comfortably in Pakistan on the kind of money you'd need for a year in the Netherlands?

The UK is what, 25th or something on the main table, I know that there are some very poor people in the UK, and indeed, I myself live in an area of the UK that gets special EU funding because it is so poor. How then is it that the people of Albania, or Turkey, say, can afford to eat and live, if they are so much poorer on average than we are? Why are there no jokes about the obscenely wealthy Norwegians flashing their cash? That's why the UN uses the PPP figure to calculate poverty thresholds.

As you are a really well travelled person I'm sure that's utterly obvious to you, but I think it is much less obvious to people who don't travel much and don't earn much. They look at these tables and think : wow, no wonder economic migration is such a problem, everyone in Eastern Europe will want to move!', or, and I read that this can be pretty catastrophic: 'wow, I should move from Nepal and get a job in Qatar'.