(ANSA) - BRUXELLES - The Eastern European countries know the EU co-financed projects better than everyone else in the European Union: 80% of citizens in Poland, 68% in the Czech Republic and 66% in Latvia have heard of such initiatives. This is the outcome of the last Eurobarometer poll, involving 27,173 citizens across the European Union. After the first three ranked countries, citizens of Slovenia (65%), Slovakia (63%), Lithuania (62%), Croatia (62%) and Hungary (60%) are the most likely to be aware of EU co-financed project, all far above the European average of 35%.

Education, health and social infrastructure are the areas that are dearest (92%) to European citizens who took part in the survey. Notably, Hungarians (98%), Croats (97%) and Latvians (96%) demand that the EU invests more in these fields.

According to the majority of the interviewees, the EU should continue to invest in all its regions undifferentiated. However, this is not what the citizens of Hungary, Bulgaria and Slovakia think: respectively 55%, 52% and 49% of the citizens in these countries said that the EU should focus its investments in the poorer regions.