Functions of government (#cofog)


The Classification of the Functions of Government (COFOG) was developed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and published by the United Nations Statistical Division (UNSD). It can be applied to government expense and the net acquisition of non-financial assets (outlays). COFOG has three levels of detail: Divisions, Groups, and Classes.

The divisions could be seen as the broad objectives of government, while the groups and classes detail the means by which these broad objectives are achieved.

The initials “CS” or “IS” follow the title of each class in parentheses to indicate whether the services produced by general government units and included in this class are collective or individual services, and thus whether individual and collective final consumption expenditure should be recorded in respective functions. This is in line with provisions in the European system of accounts 2010 para. 3.104 -3.107.

The description of the COFOG classification as published by the UNSD is reproduced here.

#cofogWW hashtags are systematically defined for each function of government as classified in the Detailed structure and explanatory notes of COFOG, Classification of the Functions of Government.

There are hashtags at two levels, for government divisions and classes.

Division hashtags

A government division hashtag has the structure #COFOG01, which ends with the numeric division code 01, 02, 03, … until 10, as summarized in the tweet below.

In country specific government division hashtags the #COFOG01 is transformed using the two character ISO code, for instance IN for India, and a postscript "fg" into #IN01fg as illustrated in the figure below for all government divisions in India:

#cofogIN hashtags for the government divisions in India

Class hashtags

There is a function of government class hashtag for over hundred classes in the COFOG classification. They have the form #cofognnnn, where nnnn is the COFOG class number. If you are not sure whether or not a topic belongs to a class, then check the the Detailed structure and explanatory notes of COFOG, Classification of the Functions of Government

The "worldwide" government class hashtags are listed at this Actor Atlas page with versions in nine other languages.

Per country a distinct hashtag is constructed for each function of government class by adding the country code. This is illustrated for Division 09 - Education in Nepal (picture taken from Nepal #cofog hashtags) :


#cofogNP hashtags for the classes in Division 09 - Education in Nepal

Similar hashtags are constructed for most countries as explained at Country hashtags and also illustrated for:


The backlinks below usually do not include the child and sibling items, nor the pages in the breadcrumbs.


#tagcoding tags for goods, services and bads