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EUROPE IN STATS

STATISTICS

Europe in stats: from Spain to Sweden

From women in the workplace to income inequality, the differences between European countries are getting greater in lots of areas. Find out who's best at having babies, who's most dependent on the state and who's most likely to get cancer.

Published: 15 January 2015 17:46 CET
Europe in stats: from Spain to Sweden
EU flags at a Europe Day event in Brussels Photo: Magnus Franklin

Some of the stats are predictable: it is perhaps unsurprising that Swedes and Swiss earn more than Italians and Spaniards, while the number of people claiming unemployment benefits has fallen over time in Sweden and Germany, while rising in France, Spain and Italy.

The Nordic countries also do well when it comes to income inequality, with Sweden and Denmark among the most equal places in Europe. But while inequality is slowly rising in the north, Italy is slowly becoming more equal – and is already more equal than Spain and the UK. You might be surprised to learn that well-functioning, prosperous Switzerland is one of the most unequal countries in the rich-country OECD.

More surprising, perhaps is that even those countries with economic problems have seen crime fall. Indeed, crime is falling everywhere – in Austria, crime is at its lowest level since 1947. In Spain, murders were down from 364 in 2012 to 302 in 2013.

There are also some surprising differences in countries that should be quite similar. Denmark has one of the world’s highest cancer rates; next-door Sweden one of the lowest. Danes’ fondness for booze and cigarettes gets the blame.

When it comes to sex and marriage, the Catholic countries of the south are less traditionalist than you might expect. Only 3.3 Italians per 1,000 got married in 2013 – a record low. The figure was the same in crisis-hit Spain. Compare that to 4.8 in Germany, 5.1 in Denmark or 5.3 in Sweden.

And women in the north are far more likely to work – 70 percent of Danish women and 77 percent of their Swedish counterparts are in the workforce. Compare this to 54 percent of Germans and 39 percent of Italians.

Italy is also doing badly at having babies. It’s worth noting that no country in Europe reaches the 2.1 births per woman needed to keep the population steady (once immigration is taken out of the equation). The French (2.01) beat the European average of 1.58, as do the Swedes (1.91) and the Danes (1.71). Spaniards, however, had only 1.32 babies per woman; Italians 1.43. But it’s not all about money – the prosperous Swiss only manage 1.54 babies per women.

Different ways of collecting and measuring data means that not all the figures in the articles are directly comparable, but it still makes for interesting reading.

Find out more here – eight countries in ten stats:

Sweden

Germany

Italy

Spain 

France

Austria

Denmark

Switzerland

 

POPULATION

Here’s how much tax Swiss people can expect to pay in a lifetime

Swiss daily the NZZ recently crunched the numbers to work out that an average worker in Switzerland could pay a grand total of €1,144,000 in taxes over the course of a lifetime.

Published: 21 March 2018 15:48 CET
Here's how much tax Swiss people can expect to pay in a lifetime
Photo: Depositphotos

The paper came up with the figure by creating a fictitious taxpayer from Aarau in the canton of Aargau where taxes are not particularly high or low. This fiscal John Doe began his working life earning the median Swiss income of 5,200 francs a month, a figure which climbed to 89,000 a year by the end of his 45-year-working life.

His total lifetime tax, meanwhile included everything from money spent on cigarettes when he was young to the 39,000 in tax payed to the church.

And if the sum of €1,144,000 seems large, it is offset by annual lifetime earnings of 3.7 million francs up until retirement age.

The total tax money might not go as far as you think either. As the NZZ pointed out, the 28,000 francs its taxpayer would give over for roadbuilding in a lifetime would pay for 36 centimetres of motorway, while the 241,000 handed over to the local municipality could pay for three BMW police patrol cars.

We thought this was a good occasion to look at some other surprising Swiss stats.

24.6 percent

That is the figure for foreigners as a percentage of the total Swiss population and it compares to 10.5 percent in Germany, 6.6 percent in France and 8.6 percent in the UK. Of course, this figure has to be viewed in the context of the difficult and lengthy process of obtaining a Swiss passport.

Read also: How to apply for Swiss citizenship in 2018

Early this year, for example, Switzerland announced it would simply naturalization procedures for third-generation foreigners, that is people who were born in Switzerland and may have spent their lives here, but do not have Swiss citizenship because their parents and grandparents did not. 


File photo: Martin Abegglen

554

This is the number of critically endangered species in Switzerland according to the Federal Office of the Environment (FOEN). This means they are near extinction in the country. “Such species tend to have an extremely restricted or fragmented range in this country, arise in significantly reduced population sizes or are only represented by a few individuals,” the environment ministry states. The figure of 554 is 5.3 percent of all species. It is a group that includes the viperine snake and the natterjack toad. 

10.5 kilogrammes

This is how much chocolate Swiss people eat on average every year. That’s equivalent to 105 100-gram blocks of chocolate a year, or almost exactly two a week. It doesn’t seem to be doing too much damage. Life expectancy in Switzerland was at 83.4 years for both sexes in the period 2000–2015 according to the World Health Organization. That is second only to Japan.

52,950

A recent wealth report by global recent estate consultants KnightFrank found the amount of money being held in Switzerland fell by 8 percent in the three years up to June 2017, noting that changes to bank secrecy laws and negative interest rates in 2015 might be the cause. But the report also found the number of multimillionaires with net assets above $5 million was up to 52,950 in 2017, a steep rise from 47,000 of a year earlier.

690,000

This is the number of cows in the country, according to the Swiss government. They were spread across 33,000 agricultural holdings in 2016, down from 48,000 in 2000. With 8.42 million people in Switzerland, that is about one cow for every 12 inhabitants. Whichever way you look at it, that’s a lot of cow bells.

Photo: Depositphotos

Read also: Swiss cows leap for joy of spring

6,957 

This was the average disposable income in Swiss francs of household incomes in 2015. Disposable income is calculated by deducting compulsory expenses including taxes, social insurance, health insurance and pensions from gross revenue, which includes salaries and bonuses, plus income from property, savings and investments.

In 2015 compulsory expenses rose to 2,990 francs or 30 percent of gross income, with taxes comprising the largest part of that, at 12 percent.

That same year, just 8.4 percent of Swiss people said they could not afford to go on a one-week holiday and 1.4 percent said the could not afford a full meal every second day, against 7.1 percent in Germany and 11.8 percent in Italy.

However, a report released in 2017 showed that around 500,000 Swiss people, or around seven percent of the population were living below the poverty income threshold. This means they could not pay for the “goods and services necessary for a socially integrated life” which in 2015 applied to those with a monthly income below 2,239 francs for a single person or 3,984 for two adults and two children.