Classification of the Functions of Government

Classification of the Functions of Government (COFOG) is a classification defined by the United Nations Statistics Division. Its purpose is to "classify the purpose of transactions such as outlays on final consumption expenditure, intermediate consumption, gross capital formation and capital and current transfers, by general government" (from home page).

These functions are designed to be general enough to apply to the government of different countries. The accounts of each country in the United Nations are presented under these categories.

The value of this is that the accounts of different countries can be compared.

Data was sourced from UN site and extracted using the scripts found in the datapkg. In addition to the UN site, versions of COFOG can also be found on Eurostat with one advantage of the Eurostat data being the availability of additional languages (e.g. German).

Gdocs version was derived from full csv (itself extracted by code in datapkg package -- which includes the csv). Gdocs version is editable and has had additional material added by community.

No license specified but factual data and extraction and normalization of the csv file done by Maintainer.