Home →
Society
→ Values
2.8

Family and work have traditionally been important values for Hungarians. We value friendship more and religion less than people in neighbouring countries. Individual freedoms, independence, emancipation, and public life are more important in Hungary than in Romania or Poland. In terms of happiness and contentedness, the situation is dire: much worse than would follow from the country's economic development. Ecological values are taking hold with great difficulties.

2.5

Spread of ecolabels

The spread of eco-labels  show less favourable developments in the Hungary. According to Eurostat data for 2010, there were only 0.6 environmental labels for one million inhabitants in Hungary, against an overall 2.14 EU average. In addition, the dynamics of Hungarian developments are not clearly positive either. True, the penetration of eco-labels is still somewhat higher than the average of the Visegrad countries (a value of 0.45 measured in 2010). As a result, Hungarian performance in this field is graded 2.5 on a scale of five.

2.5

Environmentally friendly enterprises

The evolution of green jobs is assessed with reference to the indicator of the organizational coverage of the EMAS Eco-Management and Audit Scheme per million inhabitants. In this field, Hungary showed moderate improvement on several accounts between 2008 and 2012: our indicator value grew from 1.69 to 2.92, which is significantly better than the V4 average of 1.49, measured in 2012. However, the Hungarian figure is significantly below the 8.87 EU value measured for the Union at large, and for this dimension, our performance is on the border of the sufficient and the mediocre, which merits a grade of 2.5.

2.5
2.0

Happiness

Measuring happiness is no easy task. Multiple data series are presented here.  Each concludes that Hungary is among the unhappier nations, and its citizens are much less happy than its economic position would suggest.