Classification of the Functions of Government (COFOG)

COFOG is the abbreviation of Classification of the Functions of Government. The full structure and definition of each of the over 100 classes can be found in a publication of the United Nations Statistics Division: Classifications of Expenditure According to Purpose: Classification of the Functions of Government (COFOG); Classification of Individual Consumption According to Purpose (COICOP); Classification of the Purposes of Non-Profit Institutions Serving Households (COPNI); Classification of the Outlays of Producers According to Purpose (COPP) at the website of the United Nations Statistics Division. The COFOG section and class definitions have also been added to the pages defining the cofogWW hashtags which are a part of the Ens wiki.

The classification contains the sections in the table below. Each section includes a number of classes. In the COFOG class names, four abbreviations are frequently used: CS, IS, R&D and n.e.c. CS means collective services, IS means individual services, R&D means Research and Development and n.e.c. means not elsewhere classified.

The second annex lists the classes for each of the COFOG divisions, with for each division a link to its description in the Ens wiki. The Ens wiki also includes the full definition of each COFOG class.

Tools for looking up cofog hashtags

For the cofog hashtags two tools are provided: tabbed tables in several languages and a term cloud in English.

The tagcoding pivot page of the Actor Atlas lists the COFOG classes per division in a tabbed table.

The Actor Atlas also has a English tagcloud for the functions of government.

The country #tagcoding guides list the hashtags for each function of government, for instance for education in Nepal:

The localised hashtag for the Education division in COFOG is #cofog09NP, and for the education section in ISIC it is #p1NP. The reason is that alphanumeric tags are preferred to avoid homonyms. For the cofog divisions, a tag such as #cofog01NP would be possible, but for the ISIC sections, #isicPNP is a pure alphabetic sequence and therefore hasn’t been selected. To separate the ISIC Section upper case letter from the country code, we have chosen “1”.

COFOG 01 - General Public Services

The COFOG section 01 - General Public Services contains the classes in the below table.

The tag for the function of government in a country is constructed by adding the ISO country code to the root-tag. For instance for Financial and fiscal affairs in each of the countries below: