Despite its high turnover of graduates from the university’s Faculty of Arts, Malta remains the EU member state with the lowest percentage of cultural workers with tertiary education and the lowest number of people who read books.
Recent figures by Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical office, found Malta with the lowest percentage of workers in the cultural field with a university degree (26%), while Portugal followed with 28%.
The statistics also found only 45% of Maltese respondents had read a book in the last 12 months in 2007 – the lowest of all EU member states, which has an average of 71%. Malta also fared low in visits to museums, galleries and public libraries.
In 2005, in the EU27, cultural employment was estimated at 4.9 million people, accounting for 2.4% of total employment.
People working in the cultural field generally have a higher level of education than those employed in the economy as a whole. Nearly half of cultural workers in the EU27 in 2005 had completed university studies, compared to a quarter of the workforce in general. The highest proportions of cultural workers with tertiary education were found in Estonia (64%) and Belgium (63%).
Malta also registered the highest proportions of arts students (10.9%), followed by Ireland (10.2%) and the UK (6.5%) during the 2004-2005 academic year.
The Eurostat release also found Malta had a higher than average rate of cinema goers. While the Irish were the most frequent cinema goers in 2006 with an average of 4.2 admissions per person, compared to the EU26 average of 1.9, Malta had an average of 2.3 admissions per person – a total of 9 million admissions.