Household composition across the new Europe: Where do the new Member States fit in?

In this paper we present indicators of household structure for 26 of the 27 countries of the post-enlargement European Union. As well as broad indicators of household type, we present statistics on single-person and extended-family households, and on the households of children and older people. Our main aim is to assess the extent to which household structure differs between the old and new Member States of the European Union. We find that most of the Eastern European countries may be thought of as lying on the same North-North-Western-Southern continuum defined for the old EU Member States, and constituting an extreme form of the Southern European model of living arrangements, which we term the Eastern model. However, the Baltic states do not fit easily onto this continuum.