Italian lawmakers are among the highest paid in all of Europe, according to a Eurobarometer poll in 2011.
Moreover, the economists used Gallup data and the venerable Eurobarometer survey to establish that across cultures, across countries, across continents, money buys happiness.
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It is true that Eurobarometer surveys show opinions varying with age.
The most recent Eurobarometer poll on enlargement found that 69% of Germans, 54% of French and a striking 81% of Austrians were opposed to Turkish entry.
Tantalisingly for Eurocrats, Eurobarometer polls tell them that voters like European-wide action on all sorts of issues (fully 81% say they want joint European action against terrorism).
Eurobarometer opinion polls, which survey 1, 000 citizens in each of the 27 EU members, offer rich seams of evidence that political and economic preferences vary with age.
The other night fellow Forbes contributor Josh Barro tweeted out an interesting story about European attitudes towards gay marriage, a story based on a 2006 Eurobarometer poll.
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But coming at the same time as a Eurobarometer poll showing that 59% of Europeans see Israel as a threat to world peace, the affair has led to some broader soul-searching.
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Trust in the EU has inevitably dipped as a result of the crisis, but 69% still say they have a positive or neutral image of the EU according to December's Eurobarometer survey.
The latest Eurobarometer poll on enlargement found majority support for the admission of only one new country: Croatia, a relatively advanced place whose beaches heave with sizzling Italians and Germans each summer.
Trust in EU institutions has fallen from about 45% precrisis to 33% today, but that is still higher than trust in national governments, which has fallen to just 27%, according to the Eurobarometer survey.
They may also gain from Austrians' rising Euroscepticism (according to the latest Eurobarometer poll, only 36% think that their country's EU membership, which has been a boon to the economy, is a good thing).
Eurobarometer polls consistently put Britain at or near the bottom of the heap in answers to such questions as whether EU membership is a good thing or how much trust people have in the EU institutions (see chart).
When Eurobarometer pollsters asked Turks whether membership was mainly in their interest, the EU's interest or in the mutual interest of both, the largest block of respondents (34%) thought the main beneficiary would be the EU. Perhaps surprisingly, some senior EU figures agree.
Alas this happy ploy is more or less confined to countries such as Sweden, where ministers resign for forgetting to pay television-licence fees, and members of parliament perch in tiny, state-owned bedsits while working in the capital: 72% of Danes and 66% of Swedes duly told a 2010 Eurobarometer poll they trusted national parliaments.
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