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> it makes regions with total different population densities appear on the same level It shows unemployment RATES, so population density does not matter.

• Agebor 8y ago
  It does, as the regions with different population sizes should have different overall importance.
  • anc84 8y ago
    No, why should a person living in place A have a different expectance of employment than a person in place B?
    • draugadrotten 8y ago
      Because, reality.
    • barrkel 8y ago
      Firstly, the problem is a geographical display that will visually over-weight sparsely populated areas. Secondly, per your question, it's perfectly natural to expect economic activity to increase with population density. Increased density of people means that travel costs (both time and money) are far lower, and thus the profitability bar for niche goods and services is much lower. That means there's a lot more demand that can be profitably satisfied given the population and their skills, and thus they can be better employed. In other words, there are reasons cities increase the expectation of employment: they lower transaction costs and increase economies of scale.
• molf 8y ago
  That's not true, but the problem is likely a different than you anticipated; a large region with very few inhabitants is visually more present than a small region with many inhabitants. So the number of unemployed people can be much larger in the small region than in the big region, contrary to the visual effect that the big region has on the visualisation (even though the employment rate of both regions could be the same).
  • yiyus 8y ago
    But if you are interested in unemployment rates, and not in the number of unemployed people, it does not matter. For example, both Spain and Italy have higher population density in their North regions, but a map that was somewhat normalized with respect to population density would not be clearer to show the fact that unemployment rates are much higher in Sevilla than San Sebastian, or in Lecce than in Milan. Of course, if you assume that you can derive the number of unemployed people using an average population density (ie. that the size of the regions is proportional to population), the map will not work. But in that case the problem would not be the map but a wrong assumption. A map is not a histogram.
• danieldk 8y ago
  It does matter. Consider of a hypothetical country consisting of two equally large regions. One region is desert, only 10,000 people live there and unemployment rate is 20%. In the other region there are 1M people and the employment rate is 3%. Now if you look at the map, it seems that the country is doing pretty poorly. Half of the country has a bad employment rate. Whereas in reality it only affect a small portion of the population.
  • crispyporkbites 8y ago
    Does that apply to the european regions listed here? How significant are the differences in population density that they make a tangible difference?
    • Luc 8y ago
      For example, the regions of higher unemployment in the south of Belgium make up more than half of the territory, but contain only about a third of the population.
      • ptaipale 8y ago
        Area FI1D, Northern and Eastern Finland, is the largest NUTS2 region by land area you see on this map. It covers about two thirds of Finland (>200 000 km², about 3 times the size of Republic of Ireland), and has a population of 1.29 million people. Unemployment is ~10 %. Population density is a bit over 5/km² This area is not very significant in terms of number of people, unemployed or not, but it is very visible on the map (also due to map projection which enlarges northern areas). (The four NUTS2 regions in continental Finland have roughly the same population, the fifth one Ahvenanmaa/Åland has a population of 30,000 people).
    • sammorrowdrums 8y ago
      London has a larger population than the whole of northern Ireland (8,787,892 compared to 1,876,695)
    • sammorrowdrums 8y ago