Romanians middle European happiness top

According to the latest data published by Eurostat ahead of the International Day of Happiness, organized by the United Nations on 20 March, almost 80% of European adults still declare themselves generally satisfied with their lives.

The happiest Europeans are to be found in the Nordic countries – Denmark, Finland and Sweden – where people rate their satisfaction at 8.0 on average. At the other end of the scale are Bulgarians (4.8) who were “by far the least satisfied” according to Eurostat, followed by Greeks, Cypriots, Hungarians and Portuguese (all 6.2).

Romanians are among European who are quite satisfied with their life, with an average 7.2 rate, ranking immediately after Germans, Poles and Britons, but ahead of French, Spanish, Italian citizens, but also ahead of Baltic people.

Among Romanians, youngsters aged 16 to 24 are the happiest of all, but the content scale is decreasing with the old age, reaching 6.2 satisfaction rate at persons aged over 75.

“Health condition appears to be one main determining factor in life satisfaction, ahead of factors such as financial position, situation on the labour market or social relations,” the EU statistical agency said.

Unsurprisingly, unemployed and inactive people were on average the least satisfied (5.8) compared to full-time employed (7.4) or people in education or training (7.8), who reported the highest rates of life satisfaction.

And more than half of severely materially deprived citizens reported a low level of life satisfaction, reflecting disturbing levels of deprivation in the EU countries worst hit by the economic crisis.

Younger people, as well as couples with children, tended to report higher degrees of life satisfaction, the Eurostat report further showed.

There was no noticeable difference between men and women, except for one metric. Women tend to report slightly higher levels when it comes to “meaning of life”, regardless of age or relative poverty, Euractiv reports.