Is Britain a small country?
The Times has published the top fifty countries from Jane’s list of stable and prosperous countries. The top eight are, in order with their populations in brackets, the Vatican (800), Sweden (9.1m), Luxembourg (480,000), Monaco (33,000), Gibraltar (29,000), San Marino (30,000), Liechtenstein (34,000) and the UK (60.5m). If Sweden is included, those countries are less than the population of the south-east of England. If Sweden is omitted, those states combined have a smaller population (about 606,000) than Leeds (750,000) or the London boroughs of Barnet and Ealing together (329,000 and 306,000, respectively).
Certainly, Sweden is the only country of significant size above the UK, although a lot follow immediately after it. Nine through nineteen are Netherlands, Ireland, New Zealand, Denmark, Austria, Andorra, Germany, Iceland, Switzerland, Portugal and Australia. I am tempted to say that it proves that things are well in the UK. Unfortunately, the information the Times gives us is just a ranking, with no index or, crucially, variance for each datum. It might be that the UK does well as a whole because of London, but that the rest of the country is not doing so well, or somesuch. It would be interesting to see data for the EU as a whole as well as for individual US states. Nevertheless, it seems that some of the microstates are doing extremely well. That is fine except that they seem to be doing well by acting as tax loopholes for the EU.
xD.
March 25th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
I’d like to know the effect of the other conurbations on that.
March 25th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
It obviously doesn’t include terrorist attacks as one of the criteria
March 25th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
James - on what? Sorry, it’s the end of a long day at work, so I don’t quite follow you.
WW - I don’t know, as I haven’t seen the methodology. I would also say that terrorism (as opposed to the fear or perception of terrorism) is more common among countries further down the list.