Funferal

Incomes in the European Union

Via the EU Observer, a new report on incomes in industry and services across the EU. As usual I’m interested in pulling specific points – especially those involving Ireland – into relief rather than the headline figures.
Ireland has the fourth highest average income (in the areas covered) in the EU, measured in straight euro, at €30,810 – behind Germany, Luxembourg and the UK and just ahead of the Netherlands and Sweden.
Income by level of education
When you split the population by level of education attained something strange comes out. For those with a lower second level education Ireland is still in fourth place – but now behind Finland, Sweden and the UK. When it comes to upper second level education we fall to eighth place, with Denmark, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden and the UK ahead of us. For third level education – that’s at least associate degree for you USians – we fall even further behind to 11th place, with Belgium, France and Italy passing us out.
What does this mean? At first I wondered if it meant we had far more people with lower levels of education – where we rank better – than do other countries but that doesn’t make sense, since the overall figure is averaged across your population and the differences between incomes in the various levels are substantial. Rather, it seems that more people in Ireland have a third level education, but that the added benefit of that education is less than in other countries.
Purchasing Power
When you take purchasing power into account – that is correct incomes based on price levels in each country – Ireland’s average income drops to ninth place! Notably, other than the UK all of those countries doing better than us on this measure are in the Eurozone. On a related note:

The comparison of earnings in PPS shows a much smaller gap between Member States than the comparison in euro. While the ratio between the Member States with the highest and lowest earnings in euro was more than ten to one, the ratio for earnings in
PPS was five to one.

There’s quite a bit more where that comes from, but that will do as a taster for now. I was hoping to get a comparison for the US but couldn’t track down anything that I was sure was a direct comparison.