Over the past 30 years, statisticians and other experts have been trying to establish a common framework and definitions to collect and compare data on public cultural expenditure. Recent efforts by the European Union Leadership Groups (LEG) of EUROSTAT have been building upon the original work of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Council of Europe. The Statistics Directorate of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is now spearheading a new initiative to continue this work in cooperation with all institutional and individual experts.

The resulting Compendium Working Group on Financing for Culture is made up of many of the same experts who were involved in the original UNESCO, EU and OECD exercises. This helps to ensure continuity and provides an opportunity to test and apply evolving definitions and frameworks.

As a starting point, Compendium authors present the most recent data available in their own country profiles in Chapter 6, ‘Financing of Culture’. The tables listed in this section of the site do not provide a comparison of actual figures but rather some comparative observations on the share of expenditure on one sector in relation to another, for example.