This report explores the impact of income stability and economic well-being on individual quality of life. Recent enlargement of the European Union to 25 Member States has indelibly redrawn the economic landscape: the gap in living standards between the richest and poorest countries is increasingly widening. The report puts forward a new approach to measuring poverty and deprivation, related to factors such as living standards, household income and individual perceptions of social exclusion. Its findings are based on the Foundation's First European Quality of Life Survey, which was carried out across 28 countries: the EU25, two acceding countries - Bulgaria and Romania - and one candidate country, Turkey.