correspond to photographers and image and sound recording equipment operators (ISCO 3131). Art and
entertainment are decorators and commercial designers (ISCO 3471), radio, television and other
announcers (ISCO 3472), street, nightclub and related musicians, singers and dancers (ISCO 3473), and
clowns, magicians, acrobats and related associate professionals (ISCO 3474).
EFTA includes Iceland, Norway and Switzerland. New EU are the new countries joining EU in 2004:
Czech Republic, Estonia, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia and
Bulgaria.
Source: Definition and Production of Harmonized Statistics on Culture in Europe, Chapter 1:
Employment in cultural occupations (2002), Eurostat, February 2004.
Benhamou (2000) empirically explains growth in employment in the audiovisual and performing
arts for France and Great Britain during 1981-92. The two main explanatory factors are a growing
number of people with cultural occupations working in cultural industries and structural changes in the
labour market (more flexibility, fragmentation of work opportunities). The Enterprise Allowance Scheme
contributed to higher self-employment in Britain while the specific social security benefits for artists led
to higher temporary employment in France. As more comparative data become available from Eurostat,
more research on shifts in cultural employment in Europe will be possible.
2.2 Public cultural expenditures in Europe
Throsby (1994) suggests that public cultural expenditures varied from 0.02 per cent of GDP for the US to
0.14 per cent for the UK and 0.21 per cent for Germany. Little reliable data for Europe exist, however, on
a comparable basis. Preliminary indicators on total gross public cultural expenditures have been
published for Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain. Per capita public
cultural expenditures are highest in France (180 euro), Austria (179 euro) and the Netherlands (174 euro).
For most EU countries it is hard to distinguish between gross and net cultural expenditures and between
current and capital expenditures. It is difficult to single out receipts earmarked for cultural sectors and to
avoid double counting transfers to lower levels of government. The reliability of figures on cultural
expenditures at municipal and local levels is further hampered by classification problems. Table 4
presents national, regional and local public cultural spending for three European countries, namely
Finland, the Netherlands and Spain. The data are not comparable and there are considerable data gaps and
badly covered areas. Finnish data excludes subsidies for public broadcasting, but Dutch data includes
these subsidies. The data exclude cultural subsidies from other ministries than the ministry of culture and
media, contributions from government regulated sponsors such as national lotteries, and tax subsidies for
maintenance of monumental buildings, encouragement of risk capital for film ventures, purchase of