Strip the politics out of the budget debate and read the accounts instead. Eurostat's 2024 figures: the EU-27's governments spent €8.85 trillion, and just three functions — social protection, health, general public services — took 67.4% of it. The single biggest line item hides one level deeper.
Every EU government files its spending under the same classification — COFOG, ten functions that split into sixty-nine sub-functions. That shared structure is a gift: it means you can compare what France, Germany and Poland actually do with public money, line by line, from one dataset. We nested the whole thing into a two-ring sunburst.
Social protection is 40.0% of everything the EU-27's governments spend — €3.54 trillion on its own. Health takes 15.0%, general public services (the machinery of state, plus debt service) 12.4%. Together: 67.4%. Defence, for all its headlines, is 3.0% — though that is up from 2.7% a year earlier, one of the sharper single-year moves in the file.
Drill into the outer ring and one sub-function dwarfs everything: old age — pensions and other old-age benefits — at 21.8% of all EU-27 spending. More than a fifth of every euro. And it is the biggest single line in every geography on the chart, from 13.8% in the Netherlands to a remarkable 27.6% in Italy. Hospital services (6.7%), sickness and disability (5.6%) and transport (5.1%) follow far behind.
Switch countries on the chart and the title recomputes honestly: Germany's top three take 70%, Italy's 71%, Poland's 62%. The composition shifts too — in Poland, economic affairs displaces general public services in the top three; in the Netherlands and Sweden, education takes third place. Same classification, genuinely different priorities.
A sunburst earns its place only when the nesting is the story — and here it is: the inner ring carries the ten functions, the outer ring exposes the sixty-nine lines where the real choices hide. The top-three sweep starts at twelve o'clock in the theme's hero colours while the other seven functions recede into muted tones, so the 67.4% is the first thing the wheel says. The title only claims "two-thirds" when the computed share genuinely is; other countries state their exact figure. Labels are gated by arc size — a small arc gets no label rather than an unreadable one — and every label picks dark or light ink from the measured brightness of its own arc.
This is the rare public dataset that audits perfectly: across all eight geographies and both years we pulled, the ten functions sum to each country's published total, and every sub-function sums to its parent, to 0.0% — no gaps, no double counting. Figures are current prices; shares are of each geography's own total; "n.e.c." means not elsewhere classified.
A two-level hierarchy: one row per sub-item carrying its parent, its own name, and a value — plus the published total.
| function | sub_function | spend_m_eur |
|---|---|---|
| Social protection | Old age | 1928367 |
| Social protection | Sickness & disability | 499664 |
| Health | Hospital services | 591515 |
Novice tip: don't pre-compute the parent totals — bring the leaf rows and the agent sums the hierarchy, then checks the sums against any published totals you include. If your levels don't add up, you'll be told before the chart is drawn, not after it's shared.
Budget debates argue about slivers. The accounts say most of the money does three jobs, and the biggest single job — by a factor of three over the next line — is paying for old age. That's not a position; it's the file. The sunburst just makes it impossible to unsee.
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