Press releases issued on Fridays are usually meant to be overlooked and forgotten going into the weekend. This press release from Eurostat [pdf] is probably no different, “EU25 overall tax burden at 40.3% of GDP in 2003.” This of course means that the equivalent of hundreds of billions of euros were taken from individuals and spent by government in 2003. Was some of this government spending efficient, of course. Was some of this governmental spending inefficient, absolutely.

Did this level of government taxation have any bearing on the overall economic performance of the individual EU-25 countries, decide for yourself:

Source, Eurostat

Source, Eurostat

2003 was not an exciting year for overall EU-25 GDP growth, 1.1%. When taken as a whole, Group A represents 67% of the total EU-25 GDP, Group B represents 33% of the total EU-25 GDP. When it comes to EU-25 GDP growth for 2003, Group A was the source of 28% of EU-25 growth, Group B contributed 72% of the growth for 2003.

Causation and/or correlation, not from the above. Of note, certainly.

Fun with Stats: If the two groups were split into seperate economic blocs, Group A would have registered a GDP growth rate of .44% for 2003. Group B would have registered a GDP growth rate of 2.4% for 2003.