Quality of life in enlargement countries : Third European Quality of Life Survey – Croatia

This paper is one in a series on EU enlargement countries covered by the European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS) 2012: Croatia, Iceland, Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia, Turkey and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. One way of measuring a society’s progress is by assessing the subjective well-being of its citizens, to complement the more usual economic information such as GDP. This report looks at three subjective well-being measures in Croatia, which joined the European Union in July 2013 as the 28th Member State: life satisfaction, happiness and optimism. On average, people in Croatia rate their life satisfaction at 6.8 on a scale of 1 to 10. This is below the average in the EU27 (7.1), where life satisfaction levels range from 5.5 in Bulgaria to 8.4 in Denmark.