Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Comparing National Arts Budgets

An article on Turbulence compared arts funding in the USA and UK in order to point out how pathetic the situation is in the land of the free. This got me thinking... what if you include two countries I have personal experience with: Canada and Ireland?

So I quickly looked up these annual budgets, converted all four to euros, and divided by the population. The results are quite an eye-opener.

(Due to some strange blogger formatting issues, you'll have to scroll down to see the table.)

Comparison of National Arts Budgets
  USA Canada UK Ireland
arts budget (millions per annum) US$ 125 CND$ 180 STG 417 EURO 80
arts budget (millions of €) 86.68 130.808 597.42 80
population (millions) 303.2 33.05 60.59 4.3
€ per person .286 3.96 9.86 18.6
reference here here here here

So, in the United States they'll flip you a quarter and say "good luck", in the UK you'll get a tenner, but in Ireland each person has 19 euros of their tax money put towards the arts. And you know something? I think it shows!

Anyone else want to contribute the numbers for their country?

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1 comment:

howboy said...

As you may know Canada is currently under siege from the right wing Conservative party. While our numbers are somewhat better than those sad figures for the U.S. they are still nowhere close to those of the UK, let alone Ireland. We don't know what is in store; the depth and character of the recession will only emerge in the coming year, but it is hard to be optimistic. Thank you for your wonderful table. We need this sort of quick response, global view. Keep up the great work.

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