Italy/ 6.2 Public cultural expenditure  

6.2.2 Public cultural expenditure broken down by level of government

For the time being, it is not possible to comply with the classification of public cultural expenditure in Italy according to the Compendium requirements.

Such a classification will be possible in the future only by means of special surveys. In fact, Istat's breakdown is presently available only as far as state and local expenditure are concerned, without any further distinction of the local authorities among the regions, provinces and municipalities. Such distinctions are in fact quite problematic, in particular with respect to regional expenditure, because, unlike municipal and provincial budgets, regional budgets have not yet been standardised, although the process of classifications according to COFOG's two digits is presently underway.

For the time being, though, these are the only existing official data on public cultural expenditure as a whole allowing reliable and homogenous comparisons of recent trends.

Table 5:     Public cultural expenditure by level of government, in million EUR, 2000 and 2010

Source:     Elaborations by Associazione per l' Economia della Cultura on ISTAT – Italian National Institute of Statistics data.
Notes:       For the level of government data, consolidation is made within each level but not between levels. Therefore, the total public cultural expenditure is not consolidated. The data presented here are taken from the European System of Accounts 1995 - ESA95 Questionnaire 1100_S13 - Expenditure of General Government by function, December 2010. The COFOG groups considered are: 08.20 Cultural services (IS), 08.30 broadcasting and publishing services (CS), and the residual group 08.50 R&D Recreation, culture, and religion (CS).
*                 The Local level includes: regions and autonomous provinces, provinces, consortia of municipalities, municipalities, consortia of communes in mountain areas, and institutions providing cultural services at the local level.

Public cultural expenditure in Italy had always been highly centralised, although the state share gradually declined from around 60% to around 50% at the end of the last century. According to the last reliable data on public cultural expenditure, referring to 2000 (see Rapporto, op.cit), the state accounted for 52% of the total, the regions for 15%, the provinces for 3%, and the municipalities for 30%.

Table 5 shows that, in the 2000s, the decentralisation process went further, the higher growth rate in local expenditure including the regions, provinces and municipalities (+36% between 2000 and 2010), making up for the decrease in state expenditure (-8.6%), mostly allocated by the Ministry for Heritage, followed by the Department of Information and Publishing of the Prime Minister's Office. The share of state expenditure for culture – the most affected by the financial crisis – declined from 46% of total public expenditure to 36% in the same time span. On the other hand, local cultural expenditure – dominated by municipalities, followed by the regions and, at a distance, by provinces – increased to reach nearly two thirds of the total. It looks as if the regions and the local authorities were possibly on the way to concretely carrying out, on the ground, the "unfinished decentralisation process" (Council of Europe, 1995), by making available the financial resources allowing them to exercise the still partly denied "concurrent" cultural competencies assigned by Constitutional Law 3/2001 (see chapter 5.1.2).

This kind of substitutive trend between local and state expenditure looks even more evident in Fig. 4, which shows the respective ups and downs throughout the 2000s. In fact, the most significant increases in local expenditure took place in the years of the sharpest drops in state expenditure (in particular in the first half of the decade), whereas, more recently, the dynamic of local expenditure – as a fall out of the financial crisis and the related cuts in state transfers – has been slowing down, slightly decreasing between 2009 and 2010 (-5%). A quite modest decrease, however, if compared with the dramatic drop of 28% in state cultural expenditure in the same year.

Figure 4:    Trends in public cultural expenditure by level of government, in million EUR, 2000-2010

Source:     Elaborations by Associazione oer l' Economia della Cultura on ISTAT data.

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