Abstract

Interest for the cultural and creative sector is steadily growing since the late 1990s. The remarkable efforts carried out in the last two decades to refine the statistical capacity of the European countries in order to cover and represent with data the cultural and creative economic activities have produced interesting advancements on the level of both the conceptual and methodological frameworks. On the practical level of data collection, however, «Culture statistics for the EU are not collected by a single stand-alone survey, but come from different EUROSTAT data collections» 1 . As a consequence, both level of detail and timeliness of data collected and released resent from the different statistical capacity of the EU Member States, and the resulting picture is inhomogeneous, depending strongly by the degree of priority accorded to culture in the political agenda in each single national context. While systematic targeted surveys of cultural activities remain the most desirable option for the future, the paper proposes to consider the European Commission’s project database for the Creative Europe Programme as a potential additional source of information at the micro level on NACE classes 90 and 91, i.e. those that are less covered by business statistics.