The OECD Project – Opening Remarks
John Gordon
I am pleased to see that that the subject of culture statistics has not lost its
allure. Many of you have travelled considerable distances and we
appreciate you interest and willingness to share your collective
experiences here.
Several who had hoped to be here are absent for a variety of reasons.
Some are attending another meeting on culture being hosted by the
European Commission. One delegate from Chile found her flight
oversold and was unable find an alternate flight. One of my former
colleagues from Canada found herself in a similar position but this time
weather was the culprit, not overzealous ticket selling.
I know that for many of you this is but one of a series of meetings on this
subject while for others this may be the beginning of something new.
Certainly the subject matter, from an international point of view goes
back more that 30 years.
Simon has referred to the UNESCO Framework for Culture Statistics
developed in the 1980s and you will surly hear more about it in other
presentations and discussions. Although the FCS was far from perfect, it
did provide the underpinning for a lot of the work that happened
subsequently.
The current project to revisit and revise the FCS will surely also have
ramifications on future work, but for the moment, the review is still in
relatively early stages and it may be prudent to await its completion
before attempting to finalize a new framework.
It may not even be reasonable to believe that we will ever arrive at a
single framework that will perfectly meet everyone’s needs, but I think
it’s important to work collaboratively towards that end. It may be that we
will end up with a model that has a core and a series of expanding rings
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around it. Hopefully we will eventually get to the stage where can at
least agree on a core area and then work at expanding this core to
encompass additional areas of interest.
Already from what Simon has shown here, we can still see the shadows
of the original FCS but obviously there will be significant changes as
they hammer out the details. We look forward to a continuing
cooperation with Simon and the rest of UNESCO. The final results of
should be of great interest to all of us.
Marta provided some background on the Eurostat Leadership Group (or
LEG) report of 2000. The project certainly had an effect on European
statistical work and there are several present who worked on the project.
Again I am certain that the intelligence gained from that work will also
find its way into our discussions.
These are but two of many milestones; there is also a lot of other work
being done by individual countries plus a multitude of observatories and
other groups.
With all these active players, what is the role of the OECD in the field?
A fair question. By the end of tomorrow, I hope that this workshop will
be in a position to make recommendations to the OECD on precisely that
subject.
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Not long after I joined the OECD last May, I made a short presentation
about our project to an international conference and spoke of some the
work to date. When I ask for questions at the end of the session, one of
the first was from a veteran in this field. The question was short and to
the point. John, are we going to start the process all over again?
The answer is, I hope, no.
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There is a good foundation here, some of it laid by persons in this very
room, and I believe in building on the strengths of those who have gone
before.
We began our work by looking at the work done by UNESCO and
Eurostat; we reviewed the work already undertaken by a variety of
countries to learn from their experiences. Our initial mandate was to
produce some comparable measures for a sample of five OECD countries
in a relatively short timeframe.
I have lived through discussions and debates about defining culture and I
knew that this was not the place to start over again if we were to meet our
timetable. However, I also knew that we needed some sort of framework
or the comparability target would certainly be missed
Based on collective experience of other researchers, it seemed that there
were several principles that we should keep in mind.
First and foremost, if there is to be any hope of comparability over time
or jurisdictions, a framework needs to be clear, comprehensive, and
detailed.
And although experience has shown that the process involves many
challenges, an OECD framework should, as much as possible, be
compatible with international frameworks being used by others such as
UNESCO, Eurostat, WIPO, etc.
It should also be comprehensive and should incorporate all the various
aspects for culture:
 Industry
 Occupation
 Goods and services
 Government expenditures
 Consumer expenditures
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Those of you who remember the material in our draft paper will
recognize that these categories coincide with classification standards.
Using classification standards also fits into my belief of building on the
work of others. A lot of surveys conducted by national statistical
organizations are designed according to such standards and the resulting
data are often published according to these standards. But as we all
know, classification standards are not a magic solution to all the data
problems in the culture sector.
For one thing, a lot of cultural activity is secondary as opposed to
primary in nature. This is a significant factor in measuring economic
activity. One only has to consider that design is perhaps the most crucial
aspect of launching any new car model but the activities of such an
automotive design centre rarely, if ever, can be isolated from the
published industry statistics.
Similarly, many artists find that the fruits of their passion are not
sufficient to permit a reasonable standard of living and they find them
selves working in other jobs that often take up more time and generate
more revenue that their art. Once again, it can be difficult to identify the
culture portion of their work in official statistics.
Many of these particular problems can be overcome if both primary and
secondary activity is coded and reported but my experience has shown
that coding of secondary activity does happen but is far from being the
norm.
Sometimes the problems are not always immediately evident. Culture
industries, as defined by classification standards are often much less
homogeneous than many others, and so, as a result, small but possibly
very culturally significant and unique pockets of activity can be missed
when data is collected by surveys using relatively small samples.
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Volunteer activity, a very significant factor in the culture sector,
sometimes gets missed or even overlooked due a focus on economic
measures.
Even if all the foregoing problems could be overcome, there is still the
fact that culture is not usually well reflected in most current versions of
classification standards. I expect that this workshop will provide some
recommendations on dealing with these concerns.
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Like most of you, waiting for the perfect situation is not a realistic option
for the OECD. But rather than use the value-laden terms of definition
and framework, we chose to talk about the scope of the current project
with the intention to leave a formal framework adoption to a later date.
Because our initial direction was to work from official member country
data sources, the availability of data was a factor in determining the
scope.
Here is the list of sub-sectors that we ended up using. Libraries,
museums and heritage sites and electronic games were put at the bottom
because we were not able to obtain full comparability for these categories
Not surprisingly, the basic categories strongly resemble the original
UNESCO FCS. We did exclude the two final categories of sport and
environment since only some jurisdictions include sport in their culture
statistics and none of our initial key countries included environment.
Although the LEG decided to include a sub-sector they called
multimedia, we chose not to include it mostly for the practical reason that
data were not easily available in most of our countries. It’s also an area
where definitions vary considerably from one jurisdiction to another.
We did retain advertising and fashion although the LEG chose to exclude
them.
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As I alluded earlier, when dealing with international comparative
measures of culture, one of the main challenges we faced, and one that
seems to come out in almost every study, is that of comparability, or
more precisely, the lack of true comparability.
Here is an updated version of a slide that was presented at the conference
I referred to earlier. An initially impressive slide . . . until you begin to
wonder about what that little extraneous mark is on the screen. I referred
to it as that pesky little asterisk.
The story behind that asterisk is that when you begin to look at how the
table was created you begin to discover that the concept and definitions
of ‘culture’ are not all the same in the various countries. This is not to
say that the table has no worth, I certainly don’t think that’s the case, but
if you ask me how accurate it is, I can’t give you a definitive answer
either.
I know that we, Helen in particular, worked very hard to make the
numbers comparable, but as you know, when the details are not available
in the original data, there is only so much you can do. Helen will talk a
little more about this shortly
I’m not going to bore you buy reviewing all the various studies that have
been published on culture statistics, but let me draw from one of the
most recent. This comes from “The Economy of Culture in Europe”
prepared for the European Commission and published last month.
“A strategic approach to the culture sector needs to be informed by the
development of appropriate statistical tools and indicators at both
national and European levels. . . In Europe, in the framework of
statistical systems currently implemented, the statistical categorisations
are not adapted to cultural activities and occupations. In addition, data
generally provided by national statistical institutes either do not offer the
level of details required, or are not available at all.
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They use this to frame their first recommendation Establish a strong
quantitative evidence base for policy makers.
Sounds familiar
Our first session this afternoon will look at the construction of indicators,
predominately those relating to the social impact of culture. Although the
OECD is more known for its activities in the economic aspects of
societies, it also has an interest in the social side of the equation and our
chief statistician referred to the wellbeing agenda in his earlier remarks.
Here is a quote from our draft paper which was inspired by a
conversation with a fellow Canadian Paul Schafer. “Economic outcomes
are not why most people become involved in culture and, therefore,
economic indicators alone cannot be expected to provide exhaustive
measures of the benefits cultural involvement brings to individuals and to
the societies formed by these individuals.”
In the end, I’m not yet sure how the social side will be reflected in the
suite of culture measures that will be retained by the OECD but I feel that
it is absolutely necessary that we consider a place for them.
Regardless of which measures are retained, I think that it is important, at
least from the point of view of the OECD member countries that the
measures meet at least three criteria:
 They must be measurable. That is to say that the underlying data
required to produce the measure must be available or, if not
presently available, there must be a practical methodology available
to obtain the required data.
 Comparisons at the international level must be meaningful, and of
course, the measures must be truly comparable.
 These comparisons should be useful to policy makers at the national
level.
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On this last point I would allow a certain amount of leeway because
experience has shown that policy makers have not always realized the
utility of some proposed measures when they were being discussed in the
abstract, but once they began to have access to them, they soon
discovered their value.
Much of the body of work already in place comes close to meeting these
criteria, and all of these criteria are not necessarily applicable for all work
on the measurement of the culture sector, but if international evaluation is
part of the equation, we always seem to come back to the subject of
comparability.
One of the keys to comparability is clarity.
If I were asked to highlight the most important lesson that I have learned
about surveys, data and statistics over my career it would be this -- clarity
of purpose.
The data gatherer must both clearly understand what the question is that
needs to be answered and what the data are that are required to provide
the answer. But this not sufficient in and of itself.
The data provider must also clearly understand what data are being
requested.
And there is a crucial third element; both parties must share the same
understanding. If any of these elements is missing, the outcome of the
exercise will surely disappoint at least one of the participants.
We achieve the one aspect of this equation by having a clearly defined
frame of reference; the shared understanding is achieved by having clear
definitions that mean the same thing to both parties. When running an
industry survey, this means asking the questions using terminology
familiar to the respondent. When trying to assemble data from secondary
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sources such as national statistical offices, the “industry jargon” is
usually national classification standards.
To overcome differences among the variety of national standards,
international standards were created. This is a laudable approach but in
our case, although it does point us in the right direction, it does not
completely solve our problems. In the first place, the premise that all
national standards are compatible with international standards is still far
from true, certainly not at the detailed level where most culture classes
are found. And secondly, most standards were originally developed at a
time when the service sector was a much less important part of societies
and, as I mentioned earlier, culture, which is predominately found in the
service sector, is not usually well reflected in the standards
Many have called for revisions to these standards -- and they are right -but the revision cycles are extremely long and the process complex. The
OECD works a lot with these standards and this is perhaps an area where
the organization can play a role.
However, most of us have stakeholders or clients that cannot wait for
these processes to come to fruition. One approach is to create new
standards that do serve culture well. This is an approach that Australia
followed. The Canadian province of Québec has also taken a similar
approach and one of the presentations this afternoon will give you an
insight into their process.
Many of us end up working, to a greater or lesser extent, with data
collected by some other agency or group and we do not have the luxury
of applying our own standards a priori. One of the presentations this
afternoon will show how the UK dealt with this problem by developing
allocation factors to extract the culture portion from mixed classes.
As part of our discussions in this workshop, I would like to explore the
possibility of developing generic methodologies for creating these
required allocation factors. I say generic because the intent would be to
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develop a methodology that would be equally valid in different
jurisdictions.
We will also hear about work done in the field of trade statistics and the
trials and tribulations of pulling together data on government
expenditures on culture.
Although the revision cycles of international standards are long, chances
do come along eventually and such is the case with ISCO. The ILO is
not undertaking a full revision but rather what they call and update.
Nevertheless there is a window of opportunity open before us and we
have been asked to provide recommendations to the ILO on suggested
changes to those occupations within the culture sector. We will spend
some time tomorrow working on such a recommendation.
Finally, if you have succeeded in partitioning in all your mixed classes,
the next step may be to move towards a full satellite account for culture.
Finland has taken this step and its account comes into being next January
1. We will hear about the account from both a development perspective
as well as from a policy user’s perspective.
Chile also has the taken this step; Columbia and Mexico have indicated
that they are planning to follow suit. The work on satellite accounts in
Latin America has been coordinated and supported by the
intergovernmental organization Convenio Andrés Bello. A
representative from the organization, along with colleagues from Chile
and Mexico had hoped to attend this workshop but were unable to do so
for a variety of reasons. Both Chile and the Convenio Andrés Bello have,
however offered their support if the workshop recommends the setting up
of an expert group on satellite accounts.
As I said earlier, I believe in building on past successes and I look to
exploit to my advantage anything new that come along. What’s new in
this case is the decision of the OECD to undertake a project on culture
statistics. At the end of tomorrow, this workshop will be asked to make
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recommendation to the OECD on how the expertise of the OECD can
best be brought to bear in the field of culture statistics and where this
workshop thinks the organization should focus it efforts in the short and
medium term. I look forward to our discussions.
Before opening the floor for discussions on the subject of framework, I
will let my colleague Helen set the scene somewhat by telling you about
our efforts to pull together the comparative measures for five countries
that were presented in the draft paper.
Then there will be a coffee break and the discussion will follow,
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