Italy goes to the polls on February 24 and 25, after Mario Monti, the country’s technocratic prime minister, announced his resignation in December. He is attempting to safeguard his legacy by standing as a campaigning politician, but Mr Monti faces strong competition.
This interactive graphic shows Italy’s economic standing and its regional disparities and what the newly elected government will have to grapple with once it comes to power. Read more
Challenges for Italy’s next PM in 10 charts (part 1)
Italian general elections on February 24 and 25 will determine the members of the Chamber of Deputies and of the Senate, the two houses of its parliament. This new parliament will face various structural factors behind the country’s weak performance.
Here is the first instalment of the country’s top challenges in 10 charts – another five are set to follow later in the week, so stay tuned.
1) Stagnant economy in the past decade
The Italian gross domestic product is lower than at the beginning of 2001 and the decline does not show signs of reversing. Even Spain and Greece with their deep economic contraction during the crisis are better off than at their levels at the start of the last decade thanks to their strong growth performance before 2008. Italy had sluggish growth even in the first half of the past decade and the additional output that has been created was totally wiped out with the crisis.
London has 73 fires each day – and 161 false alarms
The London Fire Brigade has published its incident data for the past four years in the London Data Store, the capital’s open data repository.
The data, originally obtained by the Financial Times under the Freedom of Information Act and published last week in our London Fire Brigade response times map, is being released as open data because of widespread interest in the potential impact of fire station closures.
The London Fire Authority is defying mayor Boris Johnson’s order to put the proposed cuts to public consultation. The £45m cut in the brigade’s budget over two years, would see 12 fire stations, 18 engines and 520 jobs go. Read more
The horsemeat scandal: what the industry is scared of
The scandal over horsemeat found in processed meat products has echoes of a previous industrial food production crisis.
While the current controversy is not of the same severity, it is interesting to look back at the BSE scandal of the mid-1990s and its effects on consumer behaviour. The BSE saga hit British farming and meat retailing hard, as other countries scrambled to block British meat exports and consumers turned away from beef (despite some politicians’ best efforts). Read more
Two Conservative-led London councils have joined opposition mayor Boris Johnson’s plan to close or shrink fire stations in their boroughs as part of £48m in budget cuts over two years.
This interactive map shows the speed with London Fire Brigade can currently respond to incidents at the most detailed level ever published.Using the Freedom of Information Act, the Financial Times obtained data on nearly 500,000 incidents that the London Fire Brigade has responded to since introducing its current incident management system in November 2008.
For the past two years, the Financial Times has had exclusive access to the National Pupil Database, which provides anonymous exam performance data for every individual secondary school pupil in England.
Using this detailed data, we have compiled an alternative set of statistics to the traditional measures, which are now set to be reassessed. Read more
| About this blog | Blog guide |
Kate Allen works in the editorial statistics team in London. She previously specialised in housing data reporting for a national trade magazine.
Chris Cook is the FT's executive comment editor. After joining the FT in 2008 as a Peter Martin Fellow, he worked for two years as a leader writer and then as education correspondent.
Emily Cadman joined the FT in 2010 and is head of the interactive desk.
Martin Stabe works on the FT's interactive team, specialising in databases for interactive graphics.
Keith Fray heads the editorial statistics team, providing data for articles and graphics. His background is in economics, studying at Birkbeck College, London.
Norma Cohen is the FT's Demography Correspondent.
Valentina Romei is a statistical researcher at the FT. She joined the FT in 2008 after working both as an academic and market researcher.
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