Measuring public expenditure in culture and sustainability

Fabio Bacchini, Lorenzo Di Biagio and Roberto Iannacone

Economia della Cultura, 2025, issue 1, 131-146

Abstract: This paper explores the intersection between cultural public expenditure and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), focusing on the Italian Ministry of Culture's budget from 2021 to 2023. Through a combination of natural language processing, topic modeling, and supervised machine learning, the study proposes a novel methodology for automatically classifying budgetary items according to their relevance to the SDGs. The analysis reveals that approximately 70% of cultural spending supports SDGs-related initiatives, particularly Goal 11 («Sustainable Cities and Communities»). However, a downward trend is observed in 2023. The approach provides a replicable framework for tracking cultural sustainability within public accounting systems across years, aligning public budgeting practices with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) perspective.

Keywords: cultural economics; treasury policy; sustainable development and well-being (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mul:jkrece:doi:10.1446/118114:y:2025:i:1:p:131-146

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