Annual cost of the EP per inhabitant, compared with some national parliaments

The graphic shows the annual running cost divided by the number of inhabitants for the European Parliament, Bundestag, Assemblée nationale, House of Commons and US House of Representatives, for the year 2011 (House of Commons, April 2011-March 2012; House of Representatives, October 2010 to September 2011).
Caution is needed in making comparisons, since each parliament has its own history, traditions and organisational set-up: budget allocations for a given purpose in one parliament may have no parallel in another, while very different levels of resources may be dedicated to apparently similar tasks. For example, the EP budget includes the costs of translation and interpreting into and out of 24 languages, and of operating in three centres – Brussels, Strasbourg and Luxembourg.