The social situation in Catalonia has gone very bad in the wake of the financial and economic crisis. Unemployment rate, here measured using the registerd unemployment, is one statistics that allow us to capture this situation. While some regions like, Alta Ribagorça had an unemployment rate as low as 5.5%, on the other extreme of the distribution, Baix Penedes had one of 16.9% in 2014.
In this graphic we can see what was the distribution of this type of social transfer every 1000 people of 65 or more living in the comarca. The intuition tell us that poorer comarques should receive proportionally more social transfer in order to reduce poverty. But more interesting is the fact that smaller populations in absolute terms have the largest and smallest percentages. This is what we except from De Moivre law and is a particular warning on using results from small samples.
Note: Lighter colors mean a larger population in absolute terms, except for Catalonia which has a different color.
However, the intuition does not seem to be quite right. As we can see in this last graphic the relation of registered unemployment to non contributive pensions in the comarca is not that strong, which probably tell us that the way this social transfer are assigned do not follow a pure social argument but rather a political one. Another interesting story is that in the wake of the economic crisis, the rate of this transfer was not increased (in many cases it was actually decreased) as we would have expected, probably due to the budget cuts.
Click on this text to see the transition of the relation of non contributive pensions to registered unemployment from 2000 to 2012 (once).