Hungary/ 6.2 Public cultural expenditure  

6.2.3 Sector breakdown

Table 8:    State cultural expenditure by sector, by level of government, in HUF, in 2009

Source:    Hungarian State Treasury.

The major part of socio-cultural activities is constituted by the operations of the community cultural centre whose functions include various forms of informal and adult education. Since the Treasury combines all forms of out-of-school education, one fourth of it was included in the socio-cultural category, which is the largest item even without this addition.

Although the central budget contains large amounts of subsidies to the public media (in 2007, 7 500 million HUF, ca. EUR 30 million), the spending of these is not identified in the tables of the Treasury. The cultural items in the budget of the Ministry of Education and Culture are on the whole higher (in 2007 exceeding HUF 60 million) than what the treasury records as cultural spending. Among further ambivalences of the records of the Treasury is the fact that construction and re-construction of buildings is taken together, without the possibility of identifying those done in the cultural sector.

On the other hand it is an advantage that the State Treasury has been applying the same system for years. Thus we can conclude that regional and local cultural expenditure keeps increasing at the cost of the central governmental budget. The latter stood at 29.5% two years earlier (compared to 23.6% in 2007). Actual difference is in fact smaller than that: at least a tenth of the spending of the local governments is subsidised from the budget of the central government. This, however, is recorded as local expenditure in order to avoid cumulating errors (reporting the same spending at both levels). The largest item of such indirect central funding is the one spent on municipal and regional theatres.

Regardless of the methodological complexities, the continued marked trend of decentralisation is clearly visible.

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