Europe is in crisis - but what's going on? Which are the right key numbers to compare each country?
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How bad are things in Europe - and how does each country compare?
Well, besides the data below, Polly Curtis' Reality Check series is a good place to start, answering key questions such as What would the collapse of the euro mean for the UK? and What happens if Greece leaves the euro?
We wanted to see which key indicators are the best for comparing Europe and might help us understand what's going on a little better. The best source for this info is Eurostat. You can download the full data below. What would you add?
1. Government debt
These are the big scary numbers - although it's still regularly mixed up with the deficit (see below) by journalists and politicians alike. As a whole, Europe owes €10,592,499,200 - or €10.59 trillion. But it's more meaningful to look at the number as a percent of gross domestic product, or GDP. So, we want to see how much that debt is as a proportion of the whole economy - kind of equivalent to measuring your mortgage compared to the whole economic value of your household. That gives us a European average of 83.4% in the first three months of this year - up from 82.5% in the fourth quarter of last. But that figure hides a lot of variation: Greece, at the top, owes 132.3%, down from 165.3% (although it has seen big GDP drops too), followed by Italy at 123.3%. The UK is just above average at 86.4%. There's nothing inherently bad about having a huge debt - it depends who you owe it to and whether you can manage the payments. Bigger countries are also in a better position: essentially, if you owe the bank £50,000, you've got a problem; if you owe the bank £50,000,000, the bank's got a problem.
2. Deficits
If the gross debt is equivalent to your mortgage, the deficit is the overdraft, the running gap between your outgoings and ingoings. Big deficits mean more borrowing, and then running it up all over again to cover the costs of that borrowing.
Again, the best way to look at these is as a percentage of GDP, and Eurstat shows which countries are worst affected, this time from the end of 2011, which is the latest available data. It shows Ireland had the worst deficit then at 13.1% followed by Greece at 9.1% and Spain at 8.5%. Compare that to Germany at 1% and you can see the relative strengths of the economies.
3. Are we still in recession?
If you look at changes in GDP - these figures are from the OECD - it does show things have improved considerably since early 2009, although growth rates have hovered around zero in the last couple of years. Last month, of course, we learned that the UK has sunk into even deeper recession.
4. Bond yields
The way governments borrow money is by selling bonds - the interest rate, or "yield", is set when the debt is auctioned. This matters because as a country the higher the rate you have to sell your bonds at, the more you'll have to pay back. In short, the lower the figure the better. As you can see from the chart below, the UK, outside the Euro, is benefiting from being a safe haven. At the other end of the spectrum, Greece and Portugal are considered less safe than Romania and Cyprus.
5. Unemployment
It might not even be part of the agenda at the summit this week, but unemployment is the indicator with the most direct impact on real people's lives of those here. Traditionally, when there's a recession, unemployment lags behind - ie, it goes up at the end of the recession and takes a while to come down again. This recession has not seen huge changes in overall unemployment yet, although the last year has seen a gradual rise.
Youth unemployment has gone up too - but the percentages are even more striking: 52.7% of 15-24-year-olds in Spain are unemployed, for instance.
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