These kinds of charts are a bit dangerous, as it will be used by anti-EU folk in net contributing countries to say look at how much money we can save when we leave the EU. But this looks only at money being shipped back and forth. The EU has so much benefits in terms of trade and collaboration, it's a steal at any price.

All people have to do to refute the leavers is point to the UK
- These people are usually reality deniers, so showing them anything is a no go.
  
  And you know how they do it too.
  
  First they do a whole FUD campaign, which get the people riled up and polarized. Up till the point that it doesn't matter what the truth is, it's tribalism, us against them etc. This phase is in full swing in Europe right now. Next they say well what if we do a non binding referendum? It shows the people we are actively taking an interest and we get to see what people think. If everyone votes remain, the issue is done and buried. Then leading up to the referendum they do a massive misinformation campaign, with TV ads, social media ads and posts, etc. Everything they can do to misinform the public, with Russia footing the bill for most of it. Most people aren't interested enough to dive into such a complex topic (and I don't blame them, it's very complicated), so they'll go off their gut and their gut is influenced by their experience in the world and on social media, so they will vote exit. After the referendum is done and the outcome is 50/50, they'll go yell: "THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN". And before you know it your whole country goes to shit and you are leaving the EU and basically committing economic suicide. By the time people realize what happened, it's much too late and all the shitbags responsible have gone away.
  
  If you told me this before Brexit, I would have laughed and told you it's total BS. But then it happened in real life and I don't know how to deal with that.
- It would be interesting to see this chart when the UK was included.
- 😢
Exactly. Germany makes way more than 25 billion Euro by being able to freely trade with neighbours.
- Not to mention the fact that the €'s low value makes german goods much more competitive for international export.
Also by improving struggling countries it means you have more and stronger markets to sell to. When you empower your neighboring countries everyone is safer and stronger.
But this looks only at money being shipped back and forth.

Not even that. It only looks at money being shipped back and forth via one specific channel.

Not surprised about Hungary, but hoooly FUCK, what's going on in Poland?

It's a big country with large regions that are still comparatively poor and agricultural. The latter two factors are what the EU pays for and the first works as a multiplicator.

Per capita it looks a bit different. According bpd.de the main recipient per capita in 2022 was Estonia with 677 Euros per capita and year and the main contributor is indeed Germany with 237 Euros. Poland "only" gets 279 Euros per person and year.
- Agriculture is a great point overlooked in this chart.
  
  EU puts a lot of money into this, and Poland being a great exporter for this, they also receives alot from EU to be able to do this.
  
  Why are we doing it then, if it's a net negative? It's not, because we can all get our bread (literally) this way. And Poland farmers can make a living making the country richer.
War in Ukraine. A whole fuckload of people that seek asylum in Poland for obvious reasons.
40 million people + communism.
- Hate to break it to you but Poland is extremely not communist
- More authoritarian kleptocracy, communism is a misnomer.

Would be nice to have the same data per capita.

statistia-netcontrib.csv

country,netcontrib
DE,25572
FR,12380
NL,6929
IT,3337
SE,2826
DK,1766
AT,1540
FI,1109
IE,703
MT,-14
CY,-172
SI,-386
EE,-729
LT,-860
SK,-1398
LV,-1544
BG,-1727
HR,-1746
ES,-1946
LU,-2020
CZ,-2853
BE,-2950
PT,-3132
RO,-4096
HU,-4206
GR,-4278
PL,-11910

eu-contribution-per-capita.r

if (!require("pacman")) install.packages("pacman")
pacman::p_load(
            countrycode,
            dplyr,
            ggdark,
            ggplot2,
            r2country
        )

abs &lt;- read.csv("statista-netcontrib.csv",header = TRUE)
abs2 &lt;- cbind(abs,name = countrycode(abs$country,"iso2c","country.name")) 

df &lt;- inner_join(country_names, abs2)
df2 &lt;- inner_join(country_population, df)
df2$percap &lt;- df2$netcontrib/df2$population2023*1000000

df3 &lt;- arrange(df2,percap)

ggplot(df3, aes(x = percap, y = reorder(name, percap))) +
    geom_bar(stat = "identity") +
    dark_theme_gray() +
    ylab("Country") +
    xlab("Euros per capita") +
    scale_x_continuous(breaks = scales::pretty_breaks(n = 20)) +
    geom_text(aes(label = percap))

ggsave("euros-percap.png")

Full size image

Sorry about the broken escaping of the angle brackets (“<” is “<”) in the source; Lemmy is, regrettably, broken on that at the moment.

EDIT: Fixed Latvia country code error.

EDIT2: And Austria country code error.

Also, a Markdown table rendition:

eu-contribution-per-capita-markdown.r

if (!require("pacman")) install.packages("pacman")
pacman::p_load(
            countrycode,
            dplyr,
            r2country,
            simplermarkdown
        )

abs &lt;- read.csv("statista-netcontrib.csv",header = TRUE)
abs2 &lt;- cbind(abs,name = countrycode(abs$country,"iso2c","country.name")) 

df &lt;- inner_join(country_names, abs2)
df2 &lt;- inner_join(country_population, df)
df2$percap &lt;- df2$netcontrib/df2$population2023*1000000

df3 &lt;- arrange(df2,-percap)

md_table(df3)

name	percap
Netherlands	386.91124
Germany	302.86855
Denmark	297.09908
Sweden	267.98643
Finland	199.90810
France	181.71677
Austria	168.68113
Ireland	136.52768
Italy	56.76638
Malta	-26.94577
Spain	-40.25217
Slovenia	-182.27546
Cyprus	-187.34343
Romania	-214.99549
Belgium	-250.73894
Slovakia	-257.60767
Bulgaria	-267.84703
Portugal	-299.21568
Lithuania	-300.05251
Poland	-315.86485
Greece	-408.10926
Hungary	-438.25808
Croatia	-449.01298
Estonia	-533.72029
Latvia	-819.79399
Luxembourg	-3056.85909

statistia-netcontrib.csv is using some weird country code that isn't ISO 3166-2, because it's got what I assume to be Latvia with the code LA which is actually Laos, and that's reflected on your chart too – I was initially a bit puzzled as to why Laos was listed as being in the EU. At a quick glance it seems to be the only weird one though

When you look closely, the most undemocratic of them are also taking the most money...

The only truly undemocratic country on that list is Hungary.
- Poland isn't much better
- Isn't a rotten apple enough to spoil the whole basket? At least we have this proverb in my country...
Meanwhile France is doing a police state and Italy elected fascists...

Poland and hungary are constantly complaining about the EU and vetooing laws too

Interesting. The red bars almost exclusively belong to nations that had authoritarian single party government in the last half century.

When laid out like this you really see how deviating and long term the consequences of authoritarianism can be. Stable healthy democracy is a fucking superpower.

I'm Polish. So, if I understand this correctly, we are getting the most out of the EU, and yet still people here are complaining about it. And about Germany.

Luxembourg and Belgium?

Both host import EU institutions. The income they provide for the locals, possibly indirectly, is also seen as a benefit.
- Strasbourg in France should also make a dent into France's contributions then. Would be nice to know how much it would be, without those things calculated in - sure they are?
- Host important EU institutions that cost a fuckton, having a world harbor (which is a boon for all of Europe being so central to it all), etc, while themselves being small.
  
  Belgium would need to put in like 7x more per capita what Germany does, simply to be at parity.
Because the presence of the EU institutions this brings a lot of money in the economy