Global trade in cultural goods doubled in less than twenty years, exceeding 254 billion dollars in 2023, according to UNESCO’s Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity report (Culture Sector). Yet most governments are steering their cultural policies blind, lacking comparable indicators from one country to another. The new statistical framework published by UNESCO in 2025 attempts to close this gap, reopening a question that progress economists have long posed: what we are really measuring when we measure culture.
The Essentials
- Global trade in cultural goods reached 254 billion dollars in 2023, roughly double the 2005 figure, according to UNESCO’s Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity report (Culture Sector).
- National statistical systems remain too heterogeneous to allow reliable comparisons: the UNESCO 2025 framework proposes a common language for culture ministries worldwide.
- The central challenge is measuring non-market practices, community participation, and effects on social cohesion, not just exports and revenues.
- Two trajectories are emerging: a broadened measure that directs public funding toward the widest cultural uses, or a market capture that renders non-market practices invisible.
- The number of countries adopting the framework in their official statistics will be the first signal to evaluate whether the tool delivers on its promises.
Doubling in Value Without Being Understood
254 billion dollars. The figure is clear, the growth impressive. In less than two decades, international exchanges of cultural goods have doubled. Books, films, video games, recorded music, arts and crafts: the global culture market has demonstrated its vitality well beyond financial crises and the pandemic interlude.
Yet this doubling masks a structural difficulty. When South Korea counts its music exports, it includes concerts, licenses, and sometimes training. When France measures its film industry, it incorporates European co-productions in a way that Germany does not reproduce. When Brazil estimates the value of its cultural production, it incorporates informal practices that the United Kingdom does not recognize as an economic sector. Result: the 254 billion is real, but the national components that add up to it do not speak the same language.
This statistical tower of Babel has concrete consequences. A culture minister wanting to justify additional budget for the performing arts to his finance counterpart has no shared benchmark to demonstrate the social return on that investment. A trade negotiator defending cultural exceptions in a bilateral agreement relies on data incomparable with those of his interlocutor. A researcher wanting to evaluate whether culture access policies reduce social inequalities encounters national definitions that vary from one continent to another.
This is precisely the problem that UNESCO’s 2025 statistical framework intends to solve.
A Common Language for Very Different Realities
UNESCO’s new Framework for Cultural Statistics, published in 2025 by the organization’s Institute for Statistics, proposes a multi-layered conceptual architecture. At the first level, a harmonized definition of seven cultural domains: cultural and natural heritage, performing arts, visual arts and crafts, books and press, audiovisual, design, music. Cross-cutting media and digital creation do not constitute distinct cultural domains in this framework. At the second level, a distinction between commercial production and non-market practices. At the third, a series of indicators on cultural participation, access, and diversity.
This standardization work goes far beyond the purely technical level. Deciding what falls within the scope of culture means deciding what will be financed, protected, or promoted. British economist Diane Coyle, whose work on measuring progress in the data economy is authoritative, has shown that our statistical systems inherit choices made in the twentieth century, at a time when the immaterial economy was marginal.
The result is a GDP that knows how to count a car built but not a song streamed a billion times, a full concert hall but not the informal transmission of artisanal know-how between generations. Digital and non-market cultures remain largely underestimated in national accounts, skewing budgetary trade-offs to the detriment of statistically less visible sectors.
The 2025 framework attempts to correct this asymmetry by explicitly incorporating non-market cultural practices. Neighborhood festivals, traditional ceremonies, community workshops, oral transmission of heritage: as many activities that contribute to social cohesion without generating measurable revenues, and that risk disappearing from view if public policies align only with commercial data. UNESCO’s effort joins thinking carried forward for several years by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, which pleaded for composite indicators going beyond monetary flow alone.
The Doubling of Exchanges and Its Blind Spots
The raw figure of 254 billion leaves in the shadows a question of distribution: does this doubling benefit all global cultural actors, or is it concentrated among a few industries and a few geographies?
Available data indicates that cultural commercial flows remain highly concentrated. China is the world’s leading exporter of cultural goods, followed notably by the United States. Yet developing countries represent 46 percent of global cultural goods exports in 2023, which relativizes the image of exclusive domination by rich countries alone. The situation is, however, very different for cultural services, where developing countries account for only 20 percent of exports. South Korea constitutes a notable case among emerging economies, with the global rise of K-pop and television series.
This geography of exchanges raises a tension that simple aggregate growth does not resolve. If commercial flows double but concentration simultaneously increases, the global indicator can mask an impoverishment of global cultural diversity. This is one of the blind spots that UNESCO’s report titled Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity 2026 attempts to address, by examining how national policies can both support their creative industries and preserve the plurality of cultural expressions in the face of standardization induced by global digital platforms.
The rise of digital industries further complicates the picture. A song produced in Lagos, distributed via Spotify from Sweden, listened to in Paris, and with rights managed from London illustrates the statistical predicament: current systems, built for physical goods exchanges or clearly localized licenses, struggle to trace these dematerialized flows.
The 2025 framework proposes categories for digital cultural services, but their implementation remains a practical challenge for national statistical institutes, particularly in countries where administrative capacities are limited.
This issue is directly linked to a broader dynamic: as illustrated by digital expansion in China and Mongolia, access to digital platforms is developing rapidly in very different contexts, but tools to measure what this produces culturally often fall short.
Cultural Participation, the Blind Spot of Current Statistics
If market value remains the easiest to measure, it is precisely what risks dominating trade-offs if nothing else is quantified. One of the most important contributions of the 2025 framework is making cultural participation practices statistically visible.
This notion covers attendance at libraries, museums, festivals. It encompasses amateur practice of music, theater, visual arts. It includes participation in local cultural traditions, reading, as well as digital practices of cultural consumption and creation.
These activities do not necessarily generate measurable commercial transactions, but they constitute the daily fabric of cultural life for the vast majority of populations.
The few countries that have developed solid surveys on cultural participation—Scandinavian countries, Canada, Australia—have a much finer understanding of their cultural life than countries that merely count creative industries. They can notably show that access to culture varies greatly by income, education, geography, or social background, and calibrate their policies accordingly.
For countries that do not yet have these capacities, the UNESCO framework provides a reproducible methodology. It is a concrete entry point for culture ministries in middle-income countries that want to argue before their finance minister but lack the data to do so. The initiative joins, in a different register, the effort documented by the Rabat experience that made the book a measurable and budgetarily justifiable urban policy.
The Indicators Will Decide for Us
The forward-looking dimension of the 2025 framework extends far beyond the technical question of statistical comparability. The indicators a country chooses to adopt define what will be rendered visible to public decision-makers, and therefore what will be financed, protected, or ignored. This structuring effect deserves to be examined directly.
Two trajectories are plausible by 2030-2040. In the first, countries progressively adopt the framework in its complete version, combining commercial data, participation indicators, and cultural diversity measures. This convergence would allow reliable international comparisons across the entire cultural spectrum, from the blockbuster film to the community pottery workshop. Public funding could then rely on an evidence base that accounts for non-market practices and social cohesion, not solely exportable value. Local festivals, neighborhood libraries, transmission of minority languages would become statistically comparable to music exports or film revenues.
In the second trajectory, only sectors generating easily available commercial data adopt the new standards. The video game, streaming, and fashion industries adopt UNESCO categories because they advantage them in commercial negotiations. Informal and non-market practices continue to go unenquired, due to lack of means or political interest. Public funding mechanically concentrates on what is statistically visible—that is, on creative industries generating revenues—to the detriment of community practices that nonetheless constitute the substrate of all cultural life.
This second trajectory is not a pessimistic hypothesis: it simply describes what happens when a tool is available but only partially used. The political economy of measurement favors actors already possessing the resources to produce data on themselves.
The gap between the two trajectories rests on two conditions that the figures do not guarantee. The first is political: governments must recognize that social cohesion and cultural diversity are legitimate policy objectives as much as growth in creative exports, and allocate survey budgets accordingly. The second is technical: statistical institutes in middle-income countries need resources to conduct robust cultural participation surveys. Several African countries and those in Southeast Asia currently have fragmented cultural statistics, incomparable and concentrated on formal industries. Closing this gap requires sustained investment in human and methodological capacities, not merely the adoption of a new conceptual framework.
The clearest signal for evaluating which direction the world is heading will be simple to read: the number of countries that have actually integrated UNESCO’s 2025 framework into their official national statistics by the end of the decade, and among these, the number that have funded dedicated surveys for cultural participation indicators.
A Useful Project, But One States Must Build Themselves
The adoption of a statistical framework by an international institution does not prejudge its national implementation. UNESCO can propose definitions, organize training, publish methodological guides. It cannot conduct surveys on behalf of national statistical institutes, nor compel culture ministries to reorient their data collection.
The history of international statistical standards invites caution about timelines. The United Nations System of National Accounts took several decades to be adopted homogeneously by member countries. Internationally comparable education statistics, driven by the OECD through the PISA program, required substantial investment and long conceptual harmonization work. Nothing suggests culture will be faster, in a domain where definitions are more politically charged than in education or health.
What can accelerate momentum, conversely, is national political demand. When governments seek to argue their cultural policies in the face of growing budgetary constraints, the availability of a credible international comparative framework becomes a negotiation tool. South Korea thus built a solid cultural statistical industry in part because the government wanted to document and amplify the international success of its creative industries. Other countries could engage in the same direction for different reasons: heritage defense, justification of cultural exception in commercial agreements, measurement of the effects of culture access policies.
The issue is ultimately that of all intellectual infrastructure: it produces effects only if it is used. The 254 billion dollars of global cultural commerce in 2023 represents an undeniable economic reality. The open question posed by the 2025 framework is whether the coming decades will be guided by this single metric, or by a dashboard that also shows what culture does to societies beyond what it brings them.
Sources
- UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2025 UNESCO Framework for Cultural Statistics
- UNESCO, Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity 2026 (report without guaranteed URL, available on UNESCO’s website)
- Diane Coyle, GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History (Princeton University Press, 2014) and subsequent work on measuring the immaterial economy
- Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission, Report on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, 2009 (available on the OECD website)
- UNESCO Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity 2026 – 254 billion figure
- UNESCO Institute for Statistics – FCS 2025
- UNESDOC – FCS 2025 Part I: Concepts and Definitions (cultural domains)
- UNESCO UIS – New Report on Global Flow of Cultural Goods (2016, 2013 data)
- LSE Review of Books – Diane Coyle, The Measure of Progress
- French Culture Ministry – Key Figures Cinema 2024