Economy of Europe
The economy of Europe comprises about 748 million people in 50 countries. The formation of the European Union (EU) and in 1999 the introduction of a unified currency, the Euro, brought participating European countries closer through the convenience of a shared currency. The European Union is a unique global organisation, an entity forming one of the largest economies in the world. The European Union also “regulates” the global market by the single market. The difference in wealth across Europe can be seen roughly in the former Cold War divide, with some countries breaching the divide (Greece, Portugal, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia). Whilst most European states have a GDP per capita higher than the world's average and are very highly developed, some European economies, despite their position over the world's average in the Human Development Index, are relatively poor. Europe has total banking assets of more than $50 trillion and its Global assets under management has more than $20 trillion.
The London Metropolitan Area has the largest gross domestic product in Europe | |
| Statistics | |
|---|---|
| Population | 748 million (2021) |
| GDP | |
| GDP rank | |
GDP growth | 0.3% (2023 est.) |
GDP per capita |
|
GDP per capita rank | |
| 6.9% (2023 est.) | |
Millionaires (US$) | 16.7 million (2022) |
| Public finances | |
| 75.4% of GDP (2023 est.) | |
| Most numbers are from the International Monetary Fund. IMF Europe Datasets All values, unless otherwise stated, are in US dollars. | |
| World economy |
|---|
Throughout this article "Europe" and derivatives of the word are taken to include selected states whose territory is only partly in Europe, such as Turkey, Azerbaijan and Georgia, and states that are geographically in Asia, bordering Europe and culturally adherent to the continent, such as Armenia and Cyprus.
Europe's largest national economies by nominal GDP over US$1.0 trillion are:
- Germany ($4.43 trillion),
- United Kingdom ($3.33 trillion),
- France ($3.05 trillion),
- Italy ($2.19 trillion),
- Russia ($1.86 trillion),
- Spain ($1.58 trillion)
- Netherlands ($1.09 trillion)
Of the top 500 largest corporations measured by revenue (Fortune Global 500 in 2010), 184 have their headquarters in Europe. 161 are located in the EU, 15 in Switzerland, 6 in Russia, 1 in Turkey, 1 in Norway.
As noted in 2010 by the Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells, the average standard of living in Western Europe is very high: "The bulk of the population in Western Europe still enjoys the highest living standards in the world, and in the world's history."