Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Euromyth 1: Agriculture

I was just reading an article on the BBC where an Austrian economist (think Creationist Biologist) was saying how the Euro was never going to work because the economies of north and south are so terribly different, because the north is industrial and the south is agricultural. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22366082

This may have been true when he was a child, but today is no longer completely accurate. Sure, southern Europe does have a larger percentage of the economy involved in agriculture than northern Europe, and if you look at Italy this is clearly the case. There are fewer large cities in Southern Europe and they have smaller incomes than Northern Europe.

If you look at a list of countries by the percent of the economy engaged in agriculture, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_agricultural_output one will very easily see how this is so very not true, and that Greece, Spain and Italy which are the hardest hit by austerity have a smaller percentage of their economy dedicated to agriculture than Denmark, and just glancing at the numbers one finds there is absolutely no correlation (let alone causation) between agricultural output and GDP growth among highly developed nations.

More to come as they come out of the Anti-European wing of economic thought, if one can call it thought when it is consistently so clearly contrary to the measured facts.

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