Serbia/ 6.2 Public cultural expenditure  

6.2.3 Sector breakdown

Table 11:   State cultural expenditure in Serbia: by sector, 2008

Source:     Office for Statistics of the Republic of Serbia, 2010; Law on Budgets, Serbia, AP Vojvodina 2008; Serbian Business Registers Agency (financial reports 2009); Decision on competitions, Ministry of Culture of Republic of Serbia 2008.

The present statistical and government statistical system does not provide precise data concerning the sectoral structure of financing culture. The government statistical system is based on GFS methodology, which recognises a very basic structure of cultural expenses (media and publishing enterprises, other cultural expenses). From the other side, the Republic Statistical Office (RSO) stopped statistical collecting in the field of social activities (which was collecting data on culture), and started collecting statistics on budgetary users, but at a low classification level (1 or 2 digit). Also, RSO use a restricted definition of budgetary users, which means that almost 50% of budgetary users are not included in statistical reporting. At the moment, there is no programme for improvement of cultural statistics. Some initiatives and activates come from the Institute for Cultural Development (such us e-culture, local cultural policy), but those initiatives and activities are based on statistical methodology which are in question (empirical classification and categories), and which are not comparable in the long-term or with international standards. Due to those problems, the Task Force for Development of Creative Industries proposed several initiatives as a part of activities focused on the development of evidence based policy in the creative industries. The first one is an improvement in cultural statistics and their harmonisation with international standards, establishing a technical board for cultural statistics (in the first stage, it will deal with improvement of long-term statistics in the creative industries), in close cooperation whit international organisations in this field as well as regional partners. The first activity in this field was organisation of "UNESCO Institute for statistics regional seminar on cultural diversity, public policy and cultural industries" in the framework of "Creative Serbia" project. Seminar is dedicated to disseminate knowledge about cultural statistics, new measures on economic contribution of cultural industries and indicators for evaluation public policies in the field of cultural diversity.

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