ABSTRACT

Eurostat is the European Union (EU's) statistics agency and has its home in Luxembourg. It is also a directorate-general of the European Commission. Eurostat collects a huge range of statistics from the EU countries – statistics that are used as the basis for decisions by the other commission DGs. The rule of thumb is that if there is some sort of EU cooperation on an issue, there are also EU-wide statistics on it. The EU's growth strategy, Europe 2020, has the goals that school drop-out rates no higher than 10 per cent and that 3 per cent of the EU's GDP is invested in research and development. Eurobarometer is the EU's own opinion research institute and is funded by the European Commission. In each country there are typically several opinion polling institutes, providing survey results to government, media or other organizations. The EU institutions have audiovisual archives from which one can download and publish photos and audio/video files for free.