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Comment by po1nt | Hacker News Reader

If there was a correlation you would see the same trend in Slovakia, Hungary and such

Slovakia growth wasn't doing too bad, for Hungary we know the reason why it's the poorest EU country, Orban stole everything.

Conservative estimates put the embezzled amount around 60,000,000,000 Euros. The upcoming government says it’s at least the double of this.

Well, you do see the same trend in gdp per capita in Slovakia. The problem is that Poland has 30m more people.

https://georank.org/assets/img/charts/economy/poland/slovaki...

Per capita Slovakia gets more EU funding than Poland yet the results are poor.

Not by much, and the trend is still there, which is the original point I was replying to

It would be hard to argue that throwing money at the problem would make it worse. I'm just saying the correlation is weak. Compare with Switzerland which is not in EU.

Per capita Slovakia and Hungary are getting way more than Poland so its the other way around if anything (of course the Baltics are a good counterpoint)

Which you do, except they're a lot smaller than Poland.

The article on AP literally has a graph showing outsized growth of Poland compared to these countries (measured in GDP per capita).

"GDP measured in constant 2021 international dollars, adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP) to account for differences in the cost of goods and services across countries"

Meh, idk what magic maths they pull, but any other sources I find do not corroborate their graph.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352708343/figure/fi...

https://dimiter.eu/Visualizations_files/cee/gdppc_country.pn...

that is a graph of growth, but they started from different baselines, e.g. Hungary was famously known as "the happiest barrack in the communist camp".

Slovakia and Hungary have trailed % growth compared to Poland, but they are far richer countries now that they were 20 years ago, and the GDP per capita for Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia is quite close to each other[0].

I'm not trying to say Poland didn't do well, it did! I'm just saying the advantages of being in the EU outweigh any national merit by a lot, which should be quite self evident.

[0] GDP, nominal, per capita: 31,336 / 28,430 / 31,242 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

If you account for PPP comparing 2006 and 2026 and also take into account cost of living, Slovakia is not that much richer.

Ukraine saw similar rise of PPP per capita as Slovakia and Slovakia wasn't even invaded in 2014.

Switzerland's GDP per capita PPP growth is same as Slovakia and Switzerland is not in EU.

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