Italy/ 6.2 Public cultural expenditure  

6.2.3 Sector breakdown

A detailed sector breakdown of public cultural expenditure is not available in Italy, due to the lack of such a breakdown for provincial and municipal expenditure: as far as the latter is concerned, only poorly disaggregated data are made available. A breakdown approaching the required classification can be obtained only by means of ad hoc surveys based on the analysis of final accounts.

2000 is the last year for which surveys have been carried out in Italy on the amount and the sector breakdown of cultural expenditure by the regions and by all five ministries involved in the financial support of the cultural field, as well as on the aggregated amount of provincial and municipal expenditure (Rapporto sull' economia della cultura, op.cit.). More recent official data on state cultural expenditure, broken down by four macro sectors, can be made available only as far as MiBAC is concerned, which is responsible for the bulk of such expenditure.

Table 6 shows the amount and trend of MiBAC's final expenditure in 2000 and 2011, broken down by administrative units according to the Ministry's budgetary classification. These units can be regrouped in four domains: Heritage, Libraries and Archives, Performing Arts and Cinema, Administration and Interdisciplinary. Some information on the amount and the trend of state financial support by other ministries to the press and to international cultural cooperation can be found, respectively, in chapter 4.2.6 and chapter 3.4.2.

Table 6:     Expenditure of the Ministry for Heritage and Cultural Activities, by sector, 2000 and 2011

Source:     Elaborations by Associazione per l'Economia della Cultura on MiBAC's final accounts.

The decline in the Ministry's expenditure in the considered time span has been very sharp: (-18%, inflation not being taken into account) and unevenly distributed among the sectors. Heritage has been, by far, the one most heavily hit by budgetary cuts (-42%), so much so that its share – traditionally amounting to more than half of MiBAC's expenditure – went down to little more than one third (although part of the R&D expenditure for heritage is supposedly included in the Interdisciplinary domain). The Performing Arts and Libraries and Archives have also been heavily hit (-27% and -29% respectively). On the contrary, expenditure for Interdisciplinary and Administration has more than quadrupled, which can be explained, on the one hand, by the Ministry's strong commitment to modernisation and digitalisation, mostly dealing with heritage, and on the other by the fact that some typologies of expenditure (e.g. salaries, not to speak of red tape) are the most difficult to restrain even in times of shrinking budgets.

It should also be underlined that, unlike in the past, final expenditure in recent years has always been much higher than forecasted expenditure: in 2011, for instance, whereas forecasted expenditure had initially been 1 425 EUR (later raised at 1 809 EUR), final expenditure was 2 046 EUR. This may be explained by an increase in the administration's spending capacity due to financial shortage, also through a better use of cash surpluses from the previous years.

The forecasted expenditure for 2012 has shrunk once again to 1 509 million EUR, 0.19% of state expenditure.

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