Top 10 European Countries by GDP (1897-2022) 

United Kingdom is only the British Isles or is entire British Empire?

@@ukzinhoblablabla Great question. It refers only to the United Kingdom and excludes its colonies.

@@RankingCharts oh, that's why Germany was in first place sometimes

thanks so much, i really liked it!

It would be really instructive, and in many ways much more meaningful, to show GDP per capita charts as well as GDP. I completely agree with those comments that applaud you for showing the long-term historic trends. Fascinating.

Well, Silesia was a part of it. So the Weimar Republic controlled two of the five most important mining areas in Europe at this time, Rhein-Ruhr and Upper Silesia. This might be the biggest reason for that. The mining industry can be restarted quickly after a war defeat.

@@arctix4518 They had to pay Millions of tones of coal to france.

Austrian painter power

This is the thing they were not poor but many people still were super bitter about the experience.

@@Anonymous_hugo12 that was all before the Austrian painter

😂😂😂

Every time they fall they come back standing on two legs again, respect!

@@mofleh177 but with all that money and wealth we have we are such a disappointment

Germany is the kid who got expelled twice for setting the classroom on fire, but somehow now has a PhD.

@@chrisjustchris8599 You've got to get yourselves out of the USA dominion and regain political independence. Uncle Sam is bad influence!😅

Except it never happened. I dunno where this guy got his figures, but the USSR remained the 2nd or 3rd economy in the world after the US and Japan into 1990.

@@ilyatsukanov8707 Apparently its the world bank and our world in data

@@ilyatsukanov8707 Yeah Soviet was like 1.1 and West Germany was like 800 lol

@@herisuryadi6885 Nonsense. The USSR was a sharply declining star in the late 1970s. By the 80's their economy was just a joke. It is even more extreme today with Russia. Especially when you consider the relations between the geographic size and the number of inhabitants. The only things that the USSR still had in the 80's were conventional weapons (though mostly junk) and nuclear weapons.

@@Ibachi07 Did you reply to the wrong guy or no

Us Germans are just built different!

Like the Madonna of Europe 😂😂

Germany doesn’t re invent themselves, they get pumped investments from foreign nations such as the USA to boost economy and trade links - without that Germany wouldnt even be top 10

@@regeturbo4782 How do you think countries become economically successful? By good trade partnerships and being an attractive place to invest. So I don’t see how your comment is meant to prove anything.

Not always in a good way though lool

Absolutely. Countries that were devastated by the war, such as Poland and the Soviet Union, had their economies significantly reduced. But for other countries, wars actually increased output - and spurred the economy!

@@RankingCharts USA:

@@wallenrod9017 USA is not a European country?!

@@EllieD.Violet USA had huge profits of this war.

And communism. Polish Economy have done a genius work, of course we're big country too

The Germans are expert’s in making money, it’s kinda ridiculous to se 😂

😴🤦

Was having a hard time getting to bed before this, but as soon as I read it I instantly fell asleep gor 16 hours, I missed half of my day. It's too effective for an insomnia cure, 0/10, would not recommend.

Well, not after they decided to de-industrialize by choosing animosity with Russia! 🤷‍♂️

@@fwfeo 🤣

Yeah, a traitor Grbachev started his Perestroika

@@keiralum1797 Traitors are those who tried to get rid of him during the coup d'etat. That caused the downfall of the Soviet Union, since the Soviet Republics would no longer be willing to sign Gorbatschows new treaty for the Union.

@@keiralum1797 which revealed how fucked up and rotten the USSR was from the inside. Not that anything changed since then.

@@axelotl86 Are the United States any better? The Russian government is rotten, but so is northamerican society (Canada is ok i guess).

@@hanspump2510 how did you leave Canada out of the North America???🤦

That is why UK wanted to put Germany down, in both World Wars.

The benefit of being centrally located inside the EU trading block cartel

@@Liberty_Freedom_Brotherhood It's rather because they have a huge auto industry, machine industry, chemical industry, metal industry, pharmaceutical industry and food industry and all the products from these fields they export worldwide

Germany benefitted from the marshall plan. The same with Japan. American wanted countries to export to.

@@inotoni6148 and because German people are the greatest

The victors step in and say, no more military spending, so all that industrial capacity has to go somewhere.

Well it was two wars

@@seed_drill7135 in the 70-90 germany had a real big military because of the cold war

@@swagkachu3784 Imagen if the Sovjet Union got the west Germany It would be realy poor to

To be fair to everyone else, Germany failed abjectly to recover after WW1 and after WW2 it only recovered at all because of the ridiculously huge amount of money given by the USA and USSR to their respective halves of Germany

yea hes super duper awesome aint he?

Indeed, it is much more accurate and interesting to see the history of countries unfold. I’m glad you enjoy!

@@RankingCharts keep up the good work!

@@JK-yi9gk 😂😂😂😂😂

Where is flag of Russian empire? Up nevermind it's correct

Yeah, Germany is a very lucky country. After the death and destruction it caused across Europe, not to mention the industrial scale murder of men, women and children, that the western allies protected it from Soviet Russia, whilst providing the money to rebuilt the country. I don’t think the axis powers would have been so humane if they had won. Yeah, Germany has done very well for its self.

@@RU-vidchannel-po8cz What is the purpose of this comment? Nobody who was responsible for that is alive today. Do you have any problem? Are you jealous or something?

@@RU-vidchannel-po8cz You know they had to pay back every single bit of money they received from the allies to rebuild right ? And keep in mind the allies didn’t help West-Germany because of how ‘generous, kind, humane’ the allies only did so because they needed a strong democratic western German ally because of the Cold War. Germany wasn’t a lucky country at all. They were stripped of 1/3 of their territories, lost 10.000.000 people as a result of ww2, had millions of German POWs work for the allies(until 1954) and many died as a result of this. Their country was destroyed, their economy crippled, their country was divided for 44 years etc. (Of course Germany wasn’t the only one to suffer badly from the war, so did countries like Poland which suffered just as bad) (Hereby I'm not justifying the actions and atrocities commited by Nazi Germany, I'm just pointing out that your statement about Germany being a lucky country is a wrong perception)

@@RU-vidchannel-po8cz If we come back that often its Kind of obvious that germany is not lucky. Germans have a good work ethic, we are dedicated and efficient, our Engineering and precision is known on the whole globe. Made in Germany was an invention to warn a customer of a product, our quality resulted in the opposite: people wanted products that were made in germany, because they last longer.

The numbers for USSR after 1918, Soviet Block 1945-1990, and to some extent for nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and the Russian Federation are completely made up by their propaganda. Yes, the level of life in East Germany after approx 1970 was higher than in any other Soviet-block country, but the GDP of a 10-million East Germany was certainly not higher than the GDP of a nearly 40-million Poland. The currency in the Soviet block was not freely exchangeable into dollars, actually, for many decades one could go to prison for just having dollars. The borders were closed, and the communist states had a monopoly on foreign exchange, the difference between the black-market and official exchange rates was tremendous: the average salary in Poland in 1988 was worth less than 20 USD if exchanged on the black market. I doubt that the same for East Germany was higher than 30-40 USD (!). I guess East Germans used a fixed exchange rate of their east mark to the West German mark, say, 2:1 or something similar, that's the reason for East Germany's position in the ranking.

Most of these data records are all kept in USD already. Still a lot of work though...

Just buy the World Almanac they have been providing this data since I've been a child and I'm sixty-eight.

Well, even today, economists just take a guess

@@stijnhs the entire system of the USSR didn't even work with the GDP number. Probably a lot of recalculation done here. Should we really trust it? Questionable.

Its all made up the creator of the video is an a poussy

beer? where?!

@@Rockingorc arbeiten faule sau

@@asgxvfhvchb46 8h reichen pro Tag 😐

And hated by most of the other countries, hold my beer anyway !

It has the largest population by a considerable margin excluding Russia.

I’m so glad you enjoy!

Check when concept of GDP was createad and you will get why nobody does these kinds videos from 1900s

Italy will become richer than the UK for sure, brexit is not working for the uk. Brexit is sinking the uk

@@apb2081 the uk still has much higher economic growth than italy, also, dont act like italy doesn't also have a terrible government.

@@apb2081 Uk's gdp growth in 2022 was projected at 7% italy's gdp growth in 2022 was projected at 3.7%

@@yournotgully The uk the only country in Europe that is in recession, even the cnn is laughing at brexit, you are not rational bbc just said that car outputs is at 66 year low , stop hiding

@@yournotgully france's economy bounced back very well, now with the lowest inflation in europe

GDP per capita is a pointless statistic

@@mrcaboosevg6089 aboslutely not... thats the important one.... you can see USSR on 1. place for many years...but reality in that empire was just terrible...

@@jaroslavklima4591 GDP per capita is just the GDP split between everyone. US has a high GDP per capita but only because there's a lot of rich people, the average person is gonna be way below the median GDP.

@@mrcaboosevg6089 i mean, GDP per capita is still much better indicator than regular GDP (as long as we are talking about country's wealthy)

@@mrcaboosevg6089 still, doesn't make it pointless and in that sense, nominal GDP is also affected by that imbalance, even more so. Per capita paints a more realistic image at least.

@@Klaus_Kinski179 i didn't know we could blame the euro for the entire ~1750-1999 period... The reason is structural, but it can be fixed with good leadership and time As the shy fellow @md_muzikz deleted his comment, i'll repeat it for context. He argued that the Euro was at fault

Many centuries of dictatorship... and the Franco scars. But being at the gate between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, Spain is favored by nature for its position. I have no doubt in the capacity of the spanish people to work hard. In my field of research, i see only good projects by spanish colleagues. Much love from France. I hope that we will collaborate more and more with time.

@@TheFrenchscot Much love mate, I work in machine learning & aerospace and trust me it's reciprocal. France recently has been producing brilliant minds such as Yann LeCun and so far my interaction with french colleagues has been a treat

@@TileBitan it's a delight to hear, especially for someone like me with some roots in Spain (Murcia... but my spanish ancestord left long ago, in 1917). Viva España

to be fair, your geography kinda fucked you. very hard to build an industrialized economy in a hilly and mountainous region without any big rivers for trade. european flatlands got that as a huge advantage for them.

That surprised me considering our low population.

@@johnnorthtribe well we avoided both world wars and have been a pretty stable and economically free country for most of the time. Works wonders for the economy.

@@samuelsomfanSwedes having no souls and only 2 generations away from chimpanzees means they need to make up for it in other ways

Duelling with Belgium for most of the time (which was devastated in two world wars), well done Belgium as well ^^

UK stayed at a pretty decent spot the whole time

That is because Ireland provided next to no economic power to the UK’s massive empire. Ireland also was given plenty of breathing room and pretty much no Irish man was paying taxes.

appreciated

It's partly a result of how GDP is calculated. Ask any economist, and they'll tell you that while GDP is a useful metric for judging national output at a glance, it is not so good for anything else, like judging what that output is made of and how that affects the population's quality of life. The country was indeed being bombed into oblivion, but those parts still running were cranking out high-tech military products, which are very valuable, and thus artificially inflate the GDP. Also, as GDP figures are calculated in yearly intervals, they gloss over the total collapse that happened over the final few months. Then, between 1946 and 1948, there was no formally existing nation in the occupied area at all, which is why you see no GDP numbers for that time span, and thus you don't see the true fall in output. When West Germany formally starts existing in 1949 and reappears in the chart, it's already starting to climb up from that invisible valley again, buoyed by the implementation of the Marshall Plan. There's a video you can look up on youtube, called "why war economies don't collapse (until they do)". Has some insight on how nations suffering from what should be mounting economic devastation can keep chugging on for longer than you'd think as long as they're at war.

@@streetwind. Good points

Tristan Thamm, all of the above also happened to Great Britain, except they were on the winning side!!.

Britain was economically devastated after the war and continued to pay back the Americans for their 'help' into the next century.

@@williammorley2401 Would have lost a long time ago at Dunkirk and without the Soviets and US

It did well in the 50s/60s as the Soviet Union was booming post-war (leading to the red scare) and as poland was a semi-puppet, it attained a high gdp comparatively to war-torn Europe

The only way is up for us. Wait till we get nuclear energy. We have very clever kids taking education seriously and people who really like to get our of bed and do projects.

Per citizen Poland was one of the poorest countries in Europe.

​@@superbiscit Do you think USSR gave something to Poland or any other communist countries ? No , they took from them what they could .They helped African and Sud-American countries where they wanted to export their "revolution". In Eastern Europe the "revolution" was already implemented by force at the end of WW2 . The rise in GDP until 1960 was due to big industrial development implemented by the communists . The people build and worked for little money - thus the GDP rise . Some were forced, many were convinced that is the good way . My country was in the 7th position up to 1960 , then it fell, when they were not able to keep up with the technological advances . Now is the second poorest in EU . Some people have absolutely no clue what communism was . I would have liked to see what all the West have done without the Marshall Plan.

@@DavidJamesquoracy If your kids are clever, they won't go for nuclear energy thought. If something goes wrong, due to an accident or war, you will poisen your country and its people for hundreds if not thousands of years. I know a turkish man who came from a region around the black sea, because of Chernobyl accident he and most of his family got cancer. The radiation got to Turkey and many people suffer where he came from.

Only if u had a stable government that wouldn't dissolve every year

@@ichbinsnicht5860 ikr? If we had fewer parties and a healthier gov we'd be number 1 lol

@@lindaliriel No1? haha. Germany is twice as rich!

@@laus7080 no what? "I am honestly amazed at how well Italy did" does not mean Italy is best! You just make yourself look silly by commenting non sequiturs like that

That is exactly what questionable politicians would say to gain power, italians should be really careful with this! Just look at Germany before the Nazi Empire, they were rather well off, considering the war reparations from the first world war, but Hitler was so convincing that there was a crisis.... Much love to Italy tho, just get a stable government and then you can enjoy dolce vita

Look at Belgium ... twice as strong as The Netherlands, till 1914-1918, ....

@@KK-rg1wz yeah and thats great, how are they standing now?

@@brodacx2268 pro capita on about the same level as The Netherlands

I would really call a country of about 20 million inhabitants small, their size interms of area is deceiving since they are one of the most densely populated countries in europe, I think actually the densest if you don't count micro states

@@vsl5455 still less than 1/4th the population of Germany and only 3% of the total European population.

Thank you! I try my best to upload more regularly. However, it is really difficult to gather the data going back so far into the past.

defenestration ^,^

@Carmen de Graaf Historically the population of Belgium was larger than that of the Netherlands. The Netherlands only surpassed Belgium in the 1930ies en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Netherlands en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Belgium Further back in the Burgundian period the difference was even larger especially due to the large population of the county of Flanders nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgondische_Nederlanden

Yes, giant foam darts all over the place!

@Carmen de Graaf And the Dutch economy isnt a gas/oil industry... its a service based industry though gas revenue did help a little.

@Carmen de Graaf That was just for a short period of time because the gas back then out weight the rest of the economy now however it barely exports gas.

Don't worry, we're not going to be switching places anymore 😉

And energy consumption and energy production! Might be hard to aggregate things like fossil fuels and renewables, or even different types of fossil fuels… but if you were somehow able to get It down to terawatt hours per year that would be amazing

@@corbynite2004 And plastics, concrete and (syntetic) rubber.

the numbers would change, but the relarive scale would be exactly the same, so theres not really a point in doing that.

Thank you very much ;) im also proud of my country Switzerland. (And the Netherlands have done it very well for its side)🎉

Thank you, as usual!

The UK had largest colonial empire worked for them. While Germany either totally or almost (in different times) didn't have colonies. And USSR in many cases vice versa developed its remote ethnic parts for the sponsorship of center (now they are such as Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan just chilling thanks to Soviet investments, having pushed out most of Russian and Ukrainian ethnicities people).

In the next 25 years the UK will knock Germany off the top spot. It will be the dominant economic power in Europe and it’s population will also surpass 80 million. Not my opinion, that’s what has been said by the analysts. 🇬🇧 🏆 👍🏻

@@expatalan6511 In the next 25 years the economy of people will finally become obsolete being changed to the economy of energy. 80 mln or 400 mln people will mean nothing more than a burden on state's neck which drags it to the bottom.

@@expatalan6511 Plz source? Brexit was not a good move. ;-)

@@expatalan6511coping

Daisuke, fall of the UK!?. Germany and the UK were number 1 and number 2 (both sometimes being at the number 1 and other times number 2 position), for most of the video, and that's how it finished, Germany at number 1 and the UK at number 2!.

Colonies which you no longer have.

I'm even more surprised to have seen Romania on the chart for a while.

@@alexandruilea915 I forgot this very very small detail 😅

More like "We feel confident enough to try and take over everything because we are rich" *Proceeds to get punched up by the British*

Italy always the one being dogshit in a big war and switching sides when they lose

Big population= large gdp

@@iactas7892 stop hating countries on RU-vid.

@@siepmans Say that to Russia or to Austria-Hungary

No, we say your government is not stable. Edit: that joke worked better before 1/6/22.

And dept and eu gold

Believe those numbers and you’ll believe anything. Italy’s figures are almost certainly not real.

Because Italy produces and has many things of the best quality: Tourism (helped by its unique history and art heritage), food, wine, sports cars, clothes, etc.

@@kdum8 Italy is a G7 country and is the 8th biggest economy in the world. The 3rd largest EU economy and the second biggest manufacturing economy after Germany. Gaslighting doesn't work when you know the facts.

@@Bibiisachildkiller the main italian industries are industrial machinery, metal products, pharmaceutical products.

But more stable

Germany is rich

@@Tutel9528 You Call 30% Children Poverty, More then 70% Elderly Poverty, More then 60% People That are poor according to their earnings, Rich? Wtf is wrong with you 😂 The Industrie and huge companies are Rich - Germans are not.

@@enilrashenilrash8888 People here think they are poor but most "poor" people here can afford vacations, expensive clothes and good phones. Poor is defined different in other countrys.

GDP gives the economic power of a country GDP per capita gives it's economic efficiency.

@@mrsupremegascon Yes.

@@mrsupremegascon economic output of a country* economic efficiency is good way of putting it

GDP per capita seems to favour small countries or tax havens so it’s also not perfect.

@@mrsupremegascon Not always efficiency. It's more wealth per person. For example Norway is not more efficient than Sweden. Norway has more valuable natural resources.

"Of course Brexit did harm to the UK" Typical unaccountable brexit jab from the remoaner. But this time you can't get away with it as this video shows some clear numbers: UK was: In 2016 - 73% of German Economy In 2021 - 75% of German Economy In 2016 - 104% of French Economy In 2021 - 109% of French Economy In 2016 - 138% of Italian Economy In 2021 - 152% of Italian Economy In 2016 - 206% of Spanish Economy In 2021 - 224% of Spanish Economy Next time you start to throw out mindless drivel actually have a look at some data first.

This timeline doesn't go far enough to reflect Britain's economic loss from Brexit - that will show up in data from the next few years.

I went to some lectures on 20thC French history a few years ago, and was shocked to hear how physically and economically ravaged France was from the two world wars. In fact I would think it's still being felt today. Many villages were abandoned or ruined. I'm guessing this led to the trend from the 80s onwards of Brits and others buying up rural French properties as holiday homes, at very cheap prices.

@@VanillaMacaron551 That's what everyone said a few years ago....

@@VanillaMacaron551 Ah well keep hoping.

'Only if your Spanish !!!!!!!

Indeed. This chart ignores the fact that people from Norway. Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands. Luxembourg, Ireland, Switzerland are the actual richest countries in Europe.

@@stevenfennell7020 per capita

1st & 2nd Monaco & Liechtenstein, 3rd Luxembourg, 4th Ireland (where big US companys "pay" their european taxes)--> all tax havens and not very significant for the wealth of the origin population there. Norway follows them because of it's oil. 6th and 7th Switzerland and Isle of Man again are tax havens (maybe less in switzerland). All in all it's not a statistic where citizens of these top countrys can be "proud" of because a lot of this wealth is generated in other countries (or luck --> oil).

@@13neworld Ireland has some of the highest tax rates in Europe, so its a pretty rubbish tax haven. It also has some of the highest pay rates in Europe, again not typical of a tax haven. The genuine tax havens are all British controlled, places like the Cayman islands and British Virgin islands. Not forgetting the City of London which is the European capital of money laundering.

@@stevenfennell7020 Ireland is/was one of the most used tax havens for big companies like apple, Amazon, IKEA, Google, Facebook and co.. The tax avoidance method is called Double Irish arrangement (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement). By using this the tax debts of these companies were halved. This tax avoidance "tool" was closed in recent years, we will see its effect to the BIP per capita in future. The Cayman and the Virgin Islands are not in Europe, so I didn't include it. The City of London is part of Great Britain, so it's effect to the BIP per capita is not as high as the small countries like Luxembourg. :)