Belgium government interest payments

Methodology

Inflation, unemployment and the minimum wage come from Eurostat and rank the latest period with figures for at least 80% of the countries Eurostat currently covers. Countries report on different days, and ranking the very latest month would leave out everyone who has not yet published. Inflation is the annual rate of the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP); unemployment is the seasonally adjusted rate for people aged 15–74, on the ILO definition; the minimum wage is the gross monthly statutory rate in euros, published twice a year. The EU figure on these pages is Eurostat's own, weighted for the whole union. The change column compares with the month before, or for the minimum wage with the same half-year a year earlier. Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Austria, Italy, Iceland, Norway and Switzerland have no statutory minimum wage — pay floors are set by collective agreements — and are named below that table rather than ranked. Eurostat does not cover every European country, and has not covered the United Kingdom since 2020; those countries are named rather than ranked.

The other fourteen rankings use one year for every country: the latest year, up to last year, for which at least 80% of the 52 listed countries have figures, so that no country is ranked against another country's older number and the IMF's projections for the current year are never used. GDP, GDP per person, real growth, government debt and population come from the IMF World Economic Outlook, revised each April and October; figures for the most recent year are partly IMF estimates. Government interest payments are the share of general government spending that goes on interest, calculated from two series in the IMF's Public Finances in Modern History — interest paid and total spending, each as a percentage of GDP — for the same country and year; a second ranking sets the same interest against government revenue, the ratio rating agencies use. Repaying the debt itself is financing rather than spending and is not counted. Life expectancy, urban population, internet use, land area and CO₂ emissions per person (excluding land use) come from the World Bank's World Development Indicators. The Human Development Index is published by the UN Development Programme and taken from Our World in Data. Population density is population divided by land area. Money figures are in current US dollars at market exchange rates, not adjusted for purchasing power.

The European ranking covers the EU-27, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, Turkey and the EU candidate countries in the Western Balkans, Moldova and Ukraine: 39 countries. Where a source also covers large economies elsewhere, a wider view adds them for context. Rankings run from the highest figure to the lowest, which is not always the best: first place in unemployment, government debt or interest payments is the highest figure, not the lowest. The EU median on the annual rankings is the middle EU country's figure, not an EU-wide average.

Eurostat figures are checked every day and the annual figures every week, and the pages rebuild whenever one of them changes. Eurostat, World Bank and Our World in Data figures are published under CC BY 4.0; the IMF figures are used under the IMF's terms of use.