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

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 Iceland: life satisfaction, happiness and optimism. On average, people in Iceland rate their life satisfaction at 8.3 on a scale of 1 to 10. This is above the average in the EU27 (7.1), where life satisfaction levels range from 5.5 in Bulgaria to 8.4 in Denmark.