Five maps and five perspectives on European regions - let’s explore!

Teodora Brandmüller from Eurostat (unit E.4) talked about 5 maps from the latest Eurostat regional yearbook and the Regions in Europe 2023 interactive edition. The European Commission announced 2023 as the European Year of Skills. In connection to this initiative Teodora presented the map of highly skilled people by NUTS 2 regions, and parallel to this a map on the Net primary income per inhabitant. She pointed out in which regions they correlate.
Recovery in tourism was analyzed next: how regions mainly relying on foreign tourism were hit the most by COVID-19 restrictions, and how slowly they are recovering, while regions that are mostly domestic tourist destinations did not experience a huge fall.
Finally, she showed a map at different geographic levels for GDP (in PPS) per inhabitant pointing out that national figures cannot reveal the significant differences, the diversities within one country. In most of the countries there is a pattern with a capital region’s dominance, but in a few cases we see more major hubs for business activity.