Interesting graph but as ever with economists (and especially the EU Tractor Stats HQ) you need to be very careful in case the figures presented have been given a slant ...... lies, damned lies, statistics and all that
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If you look at that graph you can see that the countries with the most outstanding growth rates all have relatively small GDP e.g. Romania at 5.2% growth has a GDP of approximately $186.5 billion, Malta with GDP $10.4 billion has growth 4.1%; whereas Germany with a much lower and normal growth at 1.9% has a much larger GDP of $3494.9 billion. We all know that any quantity shown as a percentage of a relatively small base looks much better when presented this way – I wonder if this is what the EU has done (by accident?
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(GDP figures below = IMF estimates for 2016)
In comparison, USA has GDP $18561.9 billion with growth of 1.6% (on the EU stats) which doesn't compare too badly when you take into account its enormous GDP. On the other hand Japan with $4730.3 billion GDP and a growth of 0.7% compares very poorly with Germany. Overall I think it's important to note that the GDPs of the EU and United States are not vastly different and neither are there growth rates.
I don't suppose all the above shows anything that a competent economist couldn't dress up in another way, but it IMHO it does give lie to the old bit about "damned lies and statistics".
PS – if you like your stats there's some quite interesting stuff here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)