Romania is often described in extremes: the EU’s fastest-growing economy, or the bottom of every league table. Both are true, just in different areas. I ranked Romania against the other 26 member states on 38 official indicators in seven domains, once around 2014 and once at the latest data point, to see what it is good at, what it is bad at, and which way each is moving. The same model ranks every EU country: you can switch the main charts to any of them.
Each row shows where the country ranked among the 27 member states at the start of the period (grey) and at the latest data point (blue). Right is better (rank 1). Choose any country below. Romania is the default.
Plotting today’s rank against the change since the start of the period sorts the indicators into four groups. Top right are strengths that keep improving. Top left are weaknesses being closed. Bottom right are strengths that are slipping. Bottom left are weaknesses getting worse, the urgent ones.
x: rank today (right = better) · y: places gained since the start of the period (up = climbed). Hover for details.
A country’s overall score is its average position across all 38 indicators (100 = best in the EU on everything, 0 = worst). To check that the ranking doesn’t hinge on which indicators I picked, I re-ran it on 2,000 random resamples of the indicator set. The whiskers show the resulting 90% range of each country’s rank.
Mean of 38 rank scores × 100. Whiskers: 90% bootstrap range of rank, shown in the tooltip.
Average rank score per domain (0–100), latest. Sorted by overall score.
Ranks show position; values show distance. Here are the selected country’s values against the EU-27 average for six indicators: the economic catch-up, the social improvement, and the gaps that have not closed.
Romania has been losing population for decades. Since 2022 the balance of migration has turned positive, with more people arriving than leaving, but deaths now exceed births by a wider margin and fertility has fallen sharply. These context series are not ranked: there is no obvious “better” direction.
Natural change and net migration (incl. statistical adjustment), Romania.
Population on 1 January (millions) and total fertility rate (children per woman).
One catalogue file defines all 38 indicators. Changing it and re-running two commands rebuilds every ranking.
I_IUX in the internet-use table means “never used the internet”. The catalogue uses I_IU3 (used in the last 3 months).I_IUGOV12 → I_IUGOV1). The series is spliced and compared through ranks, which survive the break because all countries switched together.