Idescat is offering summary statistics that bring together a set of economic magnitudes and indicators relevant to enterprises in the cultural field, which allows a more precise, reliable view of the economic dimension and yearly evolution of this sector.
The importance of culture in the field of economic and social development is recognised by the European Union, where it plays an important role in the achievement of goals from key European strategies, such as Europe 2020. Nevertheless, there does not exist a European system of cultural statistics and there is still no specific, standardised data generated about culture. Data produced by member states is often difficult to compare for various reasons:
- differences in the definition of the cultural sector and its limits;
- constant evolution in the cultural sector, which makes consensus as to its definition, difficult;
- data production methods across countries that are heterogeneous in terms of collection, regularity, scope and sources used;
- absence of a centralising mechanism within the European space.
After the adoption of the first resolution of the Council of the European Union in 1995 on the promotion of cultural and economic growth statistics, great efforts have been made to improve the comparability of cultural statistics at the European level by successive European working groups, which between 1997 and 2004 prepared the first European framework for cultural statistics and developed specific methodologies.
The definition of activities that form part of the cultural sector used by Idescat is based primarily on methodological work carried out by the European Statistical System Network on Culture (ESSnet-Culture, in PDF), created by the European Commission and Eurostat. Also taken into account was the Framework of Cultural Statistics updated by UNESCO in 2009.
Information on the activities of cultural enterprises that comprises this study comes from statistical sources as follows:
- Structural Business Statistics in the Industrial Sector (called the Industrial Companies Survey prior to the reference year 2014)
- Structural Business Statistics in the Service Sector (called the Annual Services Survey prior to the reference year 2014)
- Statistics on R&D Activities
- Survey on Innovation in Companies
- Foreign Trade (from the Department of Customs and Excise Taxes of the State Tax Administration Agency)
In this section you can find the results of cultural enterprises from the year 2008, the first year in which the Catalan Classification of Economic Activities 2009 was used (CCAE-2009) in structural statistics.