📊 Trends in European Household Spending (1995–2024)
Author: Sam Ginzburg
Tech Stack: Tableau · Eurostat (COICOP 2018) · Relational Data Modeling · Calculated Fields
Eurostat Dataset (HFCE – COICOP 2018):
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/nama_10_cp18/default/table?lang=en&category=na10.nama10.nama_10_hfc
European household consumption has expanded over the past three decades amid EU expansion, financial crises, and post-pandemic recovery.
This project evaluates not just how much spending increased, but how its structure evolved.
- Has total consumption growth meaningfully improved living standards?
- Did essentials and non-essentials grow at different rates?
- Which countries drove EU-wide expansion?
- Where do structural divergences appear?
Rather than presenting static totals, the dashboard examines composition, growth dynamics, and cross-country variation from 1995–2024.
- Reshaped wide Eurostat export into tidy format
Country × Category × Year - Converted suppressed values to nulls; enforced numeric typing
- Integrated reference tables using left joins:
- ISO country codes → full country names
- COICOP codes → product descriptions
- Validated aggregation consistency across country-year-category combinations
Result: a clean, long-format, BI-ready dataset.
- Reclassified COICOP categories into Essential vs Non-essential
- Built calculated fields for:
- % share of total
- Growth (absolute & percent)
- Essential vs non-essential deltas
- Country contribution to EU totals
- Applied dynamic value scaling (millions → billions → trillions)
- EU household consumption reached €7.38T in 2024, up 51% since 1995 (~1% CAGR).
- Spending composition remained relatively stable: essentials consistently represent ~59%.
- Growth was uneven: Eastern and Southern European economies experienced higher percentage gains.
- Housing growth was heavily driven by imputed rents, reflecting asset price dynamics more than real outlays.
All screenshots below are stored in /assets.
- Hypothesis-driven title
- Top-level KPIs (Total, Absolute Growth, % Growth, CAGR)
- Scaled values for interpretability (billions/trillions)
Side-by-side 1995 vs 2024 comparison of essential vs non-essential share.
- Consistent color encoding
- Controlled labeling for clarity
- Ratio-focused visualization
- X-axis: Total consumption
- Y-axis: % non-essential
- Custom flag shapes uploaded into Tableau
- Viz in Tooltip reveals country-level time series on hover
This design reduces clutter while preserving analytical depth.
Dual choropleths:
- Absolute growth
- Percent growth
Allows scale vs proportional comparison across Europe.
Before/after comparison (1995 vs 2024) across COICOP categories.
- Constructed non-native dumbbell structure
- Sorted for readability
- Emphasizes magnitude of change
- Consistent color scheme (primary emphasis vs contextual series)
- Structured annotation for narrative clarity
- Highlights imputed vs actual rent divergence
- Relational data modeling (left joins)
- Calculated fields & grouping logic
- Custom shapes integration
- Viz in Tooltip implementation
- Sequential & categorical color management
- Non-native chart construction (dumbbell)
- Executive dashboard layout & KPI formatting
- Clutter reduction through interactivity
- Values are reported in chain-linked volumes (real terms).
- Imputed rents represent owner-occupied housing value and materially impact housing growth interpretation.
- EU aggregates and country-level figures are sourced directly from Eurostat.
This project demonstrates the ability to move from raw statistical data to structured analysis and interactive BI storytelling.