Website: Statistics: Culture

As there are no specific collections of data pertaining to culture and the contribution of culture to the economy, the culture statistics are derived from already existing multi-purpose data collections. The culture statistics concern both social and economic statistics and relate to the following dimensions:
- employment from Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS);
- business from Structural business statistics (SBS), Short-term business statistics (STS);
- private and public expenditure from Household Budget Surveys (HBS) and statistics on Government expenditure, respectively;
- practice and participation from EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), Adult Education Survey (AES) and Information and Communications Technologies (ICT);
- international trade in goods and services (COMEXT, Balance of Payments).

Currently, the culture dedicated section presents the data that refer to cultural employment and international trade in cultural goods.

Cultural employment
Statistics on cultural employment relate to the number of workers (employees and self-employed) in the cultural field. This has been delineated in the ESSnet Culture report, and includes all individuals working in a culture-related economic activity (NACE Rev. 2 classification) regardless their occupation, as well as all individuals with a culture-related occupation (ISCO-08 classification) whatever the economic activity they are employed in.

Trade in cultural goods
Statistics on international trade in cultural goods enable to measure the value of cultural goods traded between EU Member States (intra-EU trade) and between Member States and non-EU countries (extra-EU trade). Such statistics could provide a picture of culture related products in the international trade and give some idea of the impact of the culture on the economy.

Data on external trade in cultural goods are extracted and then compiled from Eurostat Comext database which contains trade statistics for the EU Member States, EFTA countries and Candidate Countries. The list of the cultural goods to be internationally traded was identified according to the criteria presented in the ESSnet report and classified by the Harmonised Systems (HS) and Combined Nomenclature (CN).