Hungary has been in the EU for 20 years: how has GDP per capita changed?

GDP does not measure the well-being of the population. It does not say anything about the distribution of the goods produced or the effects of production on the environment. Domestic work and voluntary activities are not included in the GDP, but it shows the value of the market goods produced within a given country in one year (corrected by the estimated output of the black economy).

In terms of GDP per capita, measured in euros, the performance of our country increased by 21% between 2004 and 2008, the main reasons for which were the opening of the EU markets and the inflow of foreign working capital investments. The outstanding growth was ended by the financial crisis of 2008, after which the value of the indicator fell by 13% in just one year. At the beginning of the 2010s, the indicator stagnated, but in the middle of the decade it started to rise again: between 2014 and 2019, the value of the indicator increased by nearly 40%. The 2020 coronavirus crisis interrupted the favorable processes, but after that the Hungarian GDP per capita, measured in euros, rose year after year.

Overall, in the previous two decades, GDP per capita in euros increased by two and a half times. With this, we climbed from 39% to 54% of the EU average. In a regional comparison, however, our development is far from outstanding: the Poles grew by 3.7 times, the Slovaks by 3.4 times, and even the Czechs, starting from a higher base, by three times. Thus, the Poles made up for their previous lag, the Slovaks overtook us, and we are increasingly falling behind the Czechs. In addition, the Romanian results are constantly approaching the domestic ones. Thus, out of the 27 EU states, we dropped from 19th place to 23rd.