Life and society in the EU candidate countries

This report presents an overview of living conditions in the five current EU candidate countries – Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia and Turkey. It is based on the results of the 2016 European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS) and covers three broad areas: quality of life, quality of public services and quality of society. The report consists of an introductory overview chapter and five country profiles. The survey results are relevant both from a national perspective and in the context of the areas addressed in the EU enlargement process. They are also instructive in the broader context of the Sustainable Development Goals, which countries sometimes struggle to assess due to a lack of comprehensive monitoring measures. The EQLS results show that some aspects of quality of life are similar across the candidate countries. On a number of indicators, they score lower than the EU28 average, but the quality of certain public services is ranked relatively high in these countries.