Mapping Sweden’s Regional GDP

Visualizing the relationship between population and regional GDP share in 1571, based on data from Enflo and Missiaia (2018).

Author

Jonathan Jayes

Published

May 6, 2021

What was the relationship between population and regional GDP in Sweden in 1571?

Scatter plot and interactive map

The scatter plot below shows the relationship between population in the Swedish counties in 1571 (x-axis) and regional GDP share (y-axis).

Hovering over a point shows the name of the county, and highlights its location on the map of Sweden to the right (shown with their current borders).

Clicking on a county on the map will take you to it’s page on Wikipedia.

Source: Enflo and Missiaia (2018), Data accessible here.

Figure inspiration and code from Claus Wilke

What do we learn?

In the scatter plot above we can see that the two northernmost counties, though large in land are are very sparsely populated. The line of best fit shows that Västmanland County has a high relative share of GDP compared to it’s population, and that Kalmar Län has a high population relative to it’s share of GDP in 1571.

References

Enflo, Kerstin, and Anna Missiaia. 2018. “Regional GDP Estimates for Sweden, 1571–1850.” Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 51 (2): 115–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/01615440.2018.1429971.