The Epigone, Half Sigma and Inductivist look at a lot of American state-level data. But I have started to get curious about other countries. I've heard weird things like the claim that at some point in the 1990s northern Italy was the wealthiest part of Europe. I don't know about Italy yet (Italy at one point had a higher per capita GDP than the UK though), but I was curious at inequality in the German states and how it might relate to confession (Protestant or Catholic). I didn't find any religious trend of major note, but the gap between the former East German Lander and those of the West in per capita GDP as late as 2001 shocking (more recent data is welcome, I might look myself). To get a sense of, it looks that as if the between-lander differences are on the order of what you might see across American states, from Connecticut to Mississippi. To be fair to the komrades, the economically and socially dynamic regions of Germany have often been to the southwest near the Rhine and mineral resources, so it seems likely that Baden-Wurttemberg had a head start even before World War II.

State	GDP per capita 2001 (EURO)	Protestant	Catholic	Protestant + Catholic
Saxon-Anhalt	16.18	15.7	4.1	19.8
Brandenburg	16.27	19.2	3.1	22.3
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern	16.29	18.4	3.4	21.8
Thuringia	16.41	26.1	8.1	34.2
Saxony	16.79	21.6	3.7	25.3
Berlin	22.39	22	9.2	31.2
Schleswig-Holstein	22.57	56.3	6.1	62.4
Lower-Saxony	22.63	52	17.9	69.9
Rhineland-Palatinate	22.75	31.9	46.9	78.8
Saarland	22.96	20	65.3	85.3
North Rhine-Westphalia	25.52	28.6	43	71.6
Baden-Wurttemberg	28.75	34	38	72
Bavaria	29.22	21.7	58	79.7
Hesse	30.56	41.3	25.6	66.9
Bremen	33.92	44.1	12.2	56.3
Hamburg	42.88	32.2	10.1	42.3

Labels: culture