In Madrid, Colin Tweedy disclosed the amounts of the 98/99 business investment in cultural sponsorship in some European countries. (Later on we discovered that these had been published by CEREC, edited by This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it before.)

These data inspired us to look deeper and try to compare the level of cultural sponsorship in these countries. We found that the sponsorship per GDP in 1999 was the highest in Belgium, and the lowest in Spain and Sweden. The level of sponsorship per capita was the highest in Belgium - at the low end: Spain. See table below:

Source: Colin Tweedy; OECD

The results of our quick comparison are quite surprising. We could expect that in the United Kingdom, which is often looked upon as the European paradise of cultural sponsorship, its level should the highest - but here it is just a little higher than average. It may seem evident that the amount of business sponsorship per capita is the highest in small countries like Belgium and Austria. But Sweden and Ireland are not much bigger, and this rate there is quite low.

Certainly, this little exercise raises lots of methodological questions. Where do these countries come from? In BO's remit, in east-central Europe judging the amount of cultural sponsorship is a hopeless task. Who could tell it: the tax authorities, the statistical office, the ministry of culture, the chamber of commerce, some specialised ngo or a painstaking journalist? How to differentiate it from the widely applied quasi sponsorship labelled as donation (or donation labelled as sponsorship)? There are of course doubts as to the index of cultural sponsorship related to the GDP of the country but it goes by with some benevolence.