How do you decide a country is “average”? Like no two people are the same, countries are also different and the “average” country is a virtual concept, just like “average Joe”. There are some statistics though, that are commonly used to compare countries – geographical size, population and income, so I’ll try to use those to find out which European country is closest to what you might call “average European country”.
But first – a bit of math (don’t worry, just a tiny bit). There are several ways to decide on what is called “average”. The “mean” is the “average” you’re used to, where you add up all the numbers and then divide by the number of numbers. The “median” is the “middle” value in the list of numbers. The “mode” is the value that occurs most often. If you take the numbers 1, 3, 4, 4, 10, 20, 40 and 100, the mean will be 22.75, median is 40 and mode is 4. I don’t think mode is very useful here so I will only use mean and median in my comparisons.
Europe has 55 countries (countries are defined as UEFA members), spreads over 10.2 million square kilometres populated by 740 million Europeans who produce a total GDP of 19 trillion (with 12 zeros) USD. The data may be a bit old and the presence of trans-continental countries like Russia and Turkey makes the statistics slightly distorted. But the influence on the averages is limited – for example, 80% of the population of Russia lives in the European part, so as a first approximation its fine. Dividing all of Europe between the 55 countries we calculate that the “mean” European country has an area of 185 thousand square kilometers, populated by 13.6 million people who produce 25.5 thousand USD annually on average. No single country fits the description. The closest ones are Belarus (area), Greece (population) and Slovenia (income). Finding the “median” country is simpler – just list all 55 countries and find the 28th in ranking, the one in the middle. The “median” countries are Georgia (area), Slovakia (population) and Czech Republic (income).
An average street in an average European country
As you can see, statistics is pretty useless here – no country combines even two of the averages. So I’ll just point out the one I think is the most average. And the most average European country is… the Czech Republic! Why? Because its much “averager” than the other candidates. The Czech Republic is quite close to the mean values (except size, but Russia is distorting the statistics), and it is very close to the medians, too. Besides, a small European country that actively brands itself as being “in the heart of Europe” is sort of asking to be labelled as the “average” country, don’t you agree?
So what do you think? Do you agree that the Czech Republic is the most average European country? What do you think would be a good criterion to determine the “average country”? If you have other candidates, please let me know!