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This is a map using both proportional symbol mapping and choropleth techniques. It looks at the economies of countries in Europe by looking at both the unemployment rate of the country and the purchasing power parity (PPP) of the country.
Methods:
I began by researching the various unemployment rates for the European countries and recording them in an Excel file to manage the data. I then wanted to look at the PPP of each country, which was more difficult than I originally believed it would be. I eventually found a measure of each countries PPP which used the scale of how far one US dollar would go in the country; in other words it looked at how much goods that cost $1 in the US would cost in each respective country (ignoring regional variance and taking an average in each country). The data for unemployment rates was extremely skewed with one very high value. Due to this, I used natural breaks instead of the quintile method or equal interval method to classify the unemployment data. I generated the country outlines and chose a projection (Europe Lambert Conformal Conic) in ArcMap and exported it to AdobeIllustrator where I inserted the color classes and symbol sizes into the map.
Results:
This map shows that there is at least a correlation (inverse) between unemployment rate and PPP of a country. Though there are some outliers, particularly in Eastern Europe, this can be attributed to the way a country reports its unemployment rate and its unemployment benefits. One pattern that can be seen in this map is that Southern Europe tends to have higher unemployment and lower PPP than the northern part of Europe, particularly in the Baltic Peninsula. Though, Spain and Greece have higher PPP values, which tends to disagree with their high unemployment rates, this can possibly be attributed to the fact that they are popular tourist destinations and may be able to charge more due to this.
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