Bulgarians Produce a Third of the EU Average and a Ninth of Luxembourg

The same question in a different unit

The economy and finance category on this site reports GDP per capita in purchasing power standards, which adjusts for the fact that a euro buys more in Sofia than in Copenhagen. This study reports the same underlying quantity in euro, without that adjustment.

The two produce very different pictures, and the difference is the point.

In euro at 2020 prices, EU GDP per capita in 2025 was 34,100. Luxembourg records 100,380 and Bulgaria 11,710: a ratio of 8.6 to one. Adjusted for purchasing power, the same comparison is three and a half to one, which is the figure the companion study reports.

Which measure to use

Neither is more correct. They answer different questions.

Purchasing power standards answer: how much can people actually buy? That is the right measure for comparing living standards, and it is why the economy study uses it.

Euro figures answer: how much output does this economy produce, valued at common prices? That is the right measure for questions about economic weight — contributions to the EU budget, the resources available for investment, the scale of a market.

Using the wrong one systematically overstates or understates convergence. Reported in purchasing power, EU cohesion looks substantially further advanced than it does in euro, and both statements are true of the same economies.

The top, and the familiar caution

Luxembourg at 100,380 and Ireland at 94,930 are both distorted, and this site has documented both.

Luxembourg's GDP includes output produced by a cross-border workforce that is not in its population denominator. Ireland's includes output booked by foreign-owned firms that has little to do with activity in Ireland.

Denmark at 60,390 is the highest figure in the Union that describes what it appears to describe.

The bottom

Bulgaria records 11,710 euro, Romania 13,190, Hungary 16,370 and Poland 17,170.

Poland at 17,170 is roughly half the EU average in euro and about four fifths of it in purchasing power. The gap between those two statements is the gap between how much Poland produces and how far Polish incomes stretch, and it is why the choice of unit is not a technicality.

An average above most Member States

Eleven of twenty-seven Member States are above the EU average of 34,100.

That is because the average is weighted by output: Germany, France, the Netherlands and the other large western economies dominate it. Sixteen Member States sit below a figure described as the European average — Italy among them, at 33,080 —, which makes it a poor description of a typical European country.

The same pattern appears in packaging waste and in several other indicators on this site, and the cause is always the same. A population-weighted or output-weighted European average describes the Union as an entity, not its members.