Methodology

What is in scope

Phase 1 covers all 27 EU member states at full depth, plus four European neighbours (United Kingdom, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland) at a reduced level of detail. Each country page and the compare table share the same set of indicators, so cross-country comparison is genuinely possible.

The Phase 1 indicators

We currently track thirteen indicators, grouped in five categories:

• Economy & cost of living: AIC per capita (PPS), median net equivalised income, statutory minimum wage, affordability ratio, comparative price level.
• Labour market: total unemployment rate, youth unemployment (15–24).
• Language: EF English Proficiency Index.
• Rights & freedoms: RSF Press Freedom Index, Transparency International CPI, ILGA Rainbow Europe Index.
• Wellbeing & integration: World Happiness Score, MIPEX overall.

Why we removed GDP per capita

The most-cited economic comparison metric — GDP per capita in purchasing power standards — is heavily distorted in two of our countries. In Luxembourg, around 200,000 people commute in daily from France, Germany and Belgium; their wages count towards Luxembourg's GDP but towards their home countries' populations, inflating the per-capita figure to roughly 256 (EU-27 = 100). In Ireland, multinational corporations use the country as a hub for intellectual-property licensing arrangements, booking global profits there; the Irish state statistician has publicly accepted the term "Leprechaun economics" for the resulting 26 % single-year jump in 2015.

Eurostat itself recommends Actual Individual Consumption (AIC) per capita for material-living-standards comparisons, and that is what we show instead. AIC measures what households actually consume — goods and services, including those funded by the state — and is robust to the distortions above. Under AIC, Luxembourg sits at roughly 134 and Ireland at 100, much closer to what an arriving migrant could expect.

We pair AIC with median net equivalised income in euros, so users see a second economic anchor that explicitly resists the pull of very high earners.

The affordability ratio

Sorting countries by minimum wage alone misleads, because cost of living varies almost as much. Our affordability ratio is a simple proxy:

affordability = minimum_wage_eur_month ÷ price_level_index × 100

With this metric, Poland's €977 monthly minimum wage at price level 67 yields an affordability of 1458 — above Spain (1423) and well above Portugal (1052), even though Poland's headline wage is the lowest of the three. The intent is not to claim Poland is "better" than Spain; it is to make the cost-of-living dimension visible, so that headline wage is not the only signal.

Sources and licences

Every indicator value carries a link to its source on the country page and in the methodology accordion of the compare table. The current source list:

• Eurostat datasets (CC-BY 4.0): AIC, median income, minimum wage, price level, unemployment, youth unemployment.
• EF Education First — English Proficiency Index (free use with attribution).
• Reporters Without Borders — World Press Freedom Index (CC-BY-SA 4.0).
• Transparency International — Corruption Perceptions Index (CC-BY-ND 4.0).
• Wellbeing Research Centre, University of Oxford — World Happiness Report (CC-BY 4.0).
• Migration Policy Group / CIDOB — MIPEX (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0).
• ILGA-Europe — Rainbow Europe Index (CC-BY 4.0).

Update cycles

During Phase 1, indicator values are seeded by hand from the latest published editions and clearly marked as preliminary. We are building automated ETL pipelines (Eurostat SDMX, RSF and Transparency CSV downloads, ILGA's annual release) which will replace the seeds in Phase 2. Until then, the Last updated stamp on each page reflects the date of the last manual review, not the date of the underlying source.

Known limitations

• Policy indices like ILGA Rainbow, MIPEX and Press Freedom measure law and policy. They are weak proxies for daily lived experience, which varies hugely between cities, neighbourhoods and communities.
• MIPEX has a normative bias (more migrant rights = higher score). We surface that explicitly. It is not a happiness or quality-of-life score.
• EF EPI excludes native English-speaking countries (Ireland, Malta, the United Kingdom). Their cell is therefore empty in the table, not zero.
• Some countries set wages by collective agreement rather than statutory minimum (Austria, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Cyprus). They have an empty minimum-wage cell, which is correct.