CULTURE FINANCING IN THE EUROPEAN UNION IN COVID-19 TIMES

This paper conducts a comparative analysis at EU Member States level focused on public funding mechanisms fo r the cultural sector over the period 2014-2019 and in the year of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020). The analysis conducted and presented in this paper highlights the fact that the vast majority of EU Member States have stepped up their efforts to finance the cultural sector, starting from the lessons learned during the 2008 economic and financial crisis. Therefore, the states continued to implement increasingly coherent cultural policies, as evidenced by the fact that the states that used a mix of financial instruments in 2020 to combat imbalances in the cultural sector are generally the states that in 2014-2019 recorded a relative increase in general government expenditure on cultural services. The paper highlights the development pattern of cultural Europe with two ends, on the North-Center-South axis, by maintaining the gaps in terms of funding for the cultural sector, between the Northern and Central EU states, on the one hand, and the Southern and Eastern states of the EU, on the other hand.