Band 6+: The bar chart below shows current health expenditure totals as percentages of GDP* for various European countries for the years 2002, 2007 and 2012. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.

The bar chart illustrates the state spending on healthcare in 12 different countries in three years:2002, 2007, 2012.

With regards to the presented data, it seems that Switzerland’s proportion was fairly stable, having the highest percentage of above 10 percent of GDP. On contrary, the lowest figures were of Estonia, where the government input in health section was lower than 4% of the budget.

The other countries can be divided in four groups; having growing or falling trends, relatively stable or fluctuated ones. While Denmark, Lithuania, Norway, Poland and Slovenia increased the proportion devoted for health sphere development with growth of approximately 1 % each, some other countries like Luxembourg or Netherlands had the opposite trend with decline of no more than 2%. The situation in Spain was similar in three years, Spanish people gave 8% of their GDP to support healthcare. The last group presented by France had a gradual growth in 2007 by about 4% and reached the Switzerland figure, but in 2012 experienced a small decline to 10% only.

Overall, the figures of pie chart show that proportion of health expenditure in European regions is fairly stable with some slight changes in three given years.