A plain-English glossary of economic terms
Percent of GDP, basis points, real vs nominal, year-on-year, HICP, the Maastricht criteria — the jargon you meet on this site, defined simply.
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Plain-English explainers for every metric on the site, guides to navigating the data, and evidence-led analysis. New here? Start with the tour below.
Start here
Start here: how to use Eurospending
A two-minute tour of the site — the map, country pages, the comparison tool, the euro timeline, and the data downloads.
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Guides
How to read the site and the numbers
What counts as healthy? Key benchmarks and thresholds
The reference lines that turn a raw number into a judgement — the 3% deficit and 60% debt limits, the ECB's 2% inflation target, and more.
Eurozone vs EU: what's the difference?
Why some figures cover 27 countries and others only the 20 that share the euro — and why it matters for reading monetary data.
Where our data comes from and how we check it
Only official sources — Eurostat, the ECB and the IMF — pulled by deterministic code, validated before publication, never estimated by us.
Metric explainers
What each number means, in plain English
The euro priced in gold and Bitcoin
Why we track the euro against scarce assets, and what a rising gold or Bitcoin price really says about the currency.
Net migration and population change
Why most EU population change now comes from migration rather than births, and how the crude rates are measured.
Government spending (total expenditure)
What total general government expenditure as a share of GDP measures, and how to read it.
Government spending by function: health, education, defence, social protection
How the COFOG breakdown splits public spending into what governments actually spend it on.
Government revenue
Total general government revenue as a share of GDP — essentially the overall tax-and-contributions take.
Deficit and surplus (net lending/borrowing)
The gap between what a government raises and what it spends in a year, and the 3%-of-GDP Maastricht limit.
Government debt
Gross general government debt — the accumulated stock of borrowing — shown both as a share of GDP and in euros, with the 60% limit.
GDP and real growth
The size of the economy in euros, and how fast it is actually growing once inflation is removed.
GDP per capita
Economic output divided by population — the simplest single gauge of average prosperity.
Unemployment rate
The share of people who want work and cannot find it — the headline gauge of labour-market health.
Population
Total population on 1 January — the denominator behind per-capita figures and a slow-moving driver of everything else.
Inflation (HICP)
The Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices — the EU's standard measure of how fast the cost of living is rising.
Core inflation
Inflation with volatile food and energy stripped out, used to read the underlying price trend.
ECB policy interest rates
The three rates the European Central Bank sets to steer the cost of money across the eurozone.
The Eurosystem balance sheet
The total assets held by the ECB and national central banks — a direct read on how much money the central bank has created.
Money supply (M1, M2, M3)
How much money exists in the eurozone, from cash and current accounts up to the broad measure the ECB tracks.
Exchange rates (EUR/USD, EUR/GBP)
What one euro buys in dollars and pounds — the external value of the currency.
Government bond yields (10-year)
The interest rate governments pay to borrow for ten years — and what the spread between countries reveals.
Housing cost burden
The share of people spending more than 40% of their income on housing — a direct measure of affordability stress.
IMF forecasts (World Economic Outlook)
Forward-looking projections for growth, inflation, deficits and debt, on a consistent cross-country basis.
Analysis
Evidence-led commentary
Currency debasement, explained
Why the euro in your pocket buys less each year, how money-supply growth and inflation connect, and where to watch it in the data.
The growth gap: how the EU compares with the US and China
Real growth and income per head have pulled apart between the EU, the United States and the fast-growing economies of Asia. What the data shows.
Tax, spend, and growth in the EU
Government revenue and spending are large shares of EU economies. The open question is what that buys in growth — and the data lets you look.