Last year, Romania was on the 33 rd place out of 42 European countries ranking in terms of purchasing power, GfK “Purchasing Power Europe 2016” study reveals.
Thus, Romania posted a growth of 12 percent compared with 2015, with an average disposable income per capita of EUR 4.181.
According to the GfK study, a total of approximately EUR 9.18 trillion is available to European consumers in 2016 for spending and saving. This corresponds to an average per-capita purchasing power of EUR13,672 for the 42 countries evaluated in the study, which is a nominal increase of approximately 0.3 percent. The low growth in Europe’s average per-capita purchasing power is due to exchange rate effects and stagnating growth rates in some of the larger countries, among other factors.
“Nonetheless, many countries have growth rates above 5 percent, including Iceland, Bulgaria, Romania, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Malta, Slovakia, Luxembourg and Latvia,” the document reads.
As regards Romania, Bucharest is the city with the highest purchase power – EUR 6,288 per capita, with 50 percent over the country average.
Inhabitants of Liechtenstein, the country with the highest purchasing power, have almost eighty times as much purchasing power per person as inhabitants of the Ukraine, which has the lowest purchasing power in Europe. The four countries with the greatest number of inhabitants – Germany, Great Britain, France and Italy – comprise approximately 40 percent of Europe’s population and almost 60 percent of the continent’s purchasing power.
Even within the top-ten ranked countries, Liechtenstein and Switzerland significantly outpace the others with purchasing power values that are 3 to 4.6 times (respectively) the European average. Lagging substantially behind is third-ranked Luxembourg, with 2.2 times the European average. All other countries in the top ten have at least 1.5 times the average European per-capita purchasing power.