Archives for March 6th, 2004

The European Commission recently published “Perceptions of living conditions in an enlarged Europe.” (PDF)

It’s full of interesting stuff. I pulled out two things which I found particularly worthwhile. The first is this table, which shows the monthly mean¹ household income of countries in the EU-28. For the sake of clarity, I only used a few of them.²

This shouldn’t be much of a surprise. The important thing to note is that the values given for France and Germany are about double those for Slovenia. The average Danish monthly income is more than quadruple that of the average Slovene’s. And while Slovenia is in first place when it comes to eastern Europe, it’s actually still below the European average. (The EU-28 arithmetic average is 740.65 euros/month.)

But now it gets interesting, because when Europeans were asked “How satisfied are you with your life in general?” Slovenia somehow ended ahead of core European countries like Germany, France and Italy. Look at this:

Click to enlarge!

If you don’t feel like clicking on the graph above, here’s the relevant data in tabular form: (Can you tell I’m a big fan of tables?)

Slovenia finished on par with the U.K. and Finland, and ahead of seven current EU members. So, while it’s true that richer countries are generally happier than poorer ones — Danes are very satisfied and very rich, while Bulgarians are not so satisfied and not so rich — there are nevertheless interesting exceptions… and Slovenia is one of them.

The question is: what does this say about Slovenia’s frantic race to join the EU and prosper like the west? If the west is so advanced but still can’t get no satisfaction, are they the dream Slovenia should be dreaming of?

—————–

1. The arithmetic average. In Slovene: povprecen.
2. You can see the rest of the countries in the report on page 13, table one.