Korea Gives by Choice, India Gives by Law: Two Models of Corporate Arts Patronage

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Korean companies put 196.879 billion won (about 1,969 hundred million won) into arts and culture in 2025, down 7.4% from the year before, even as more firms and more projects took part. In India, a law requires large companies to spend on social causes, yet arts and culture receive only a small slice of that money.

Two Ways of Funding the Arts

In Korea, 728 companies backed the arts in 2025, a 24% rise, and the number of supported projects climbed 28.5% to 2,392. Even so, total giving fell for the first time in three years. Korean companies and corporate foundations decide on their own whether to support the arts and how much to give, while the government encourages them through tax benefits, certification schemes and matching funds.

India takes a different route. Under its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) rules, companies above a certain size must spend at least 2% of their average net profit from the previous three fiscal years on social causes. Companies then choose projects from several fields set out in the law, and arts and culture is one of those fields.

The numbers show how that choice plays out. In the 2024-2025 fiscal year, Indian companies spent a total of 40,794 crore rupees on CSR, and 692.22 crore rupees of that went to arts and culture. That is about 1.7% of all CSR spending.

Why It Matters

Korea's voluntary model has widened participation but has not kept total funding growing, while India's mandate guarantees a large pool of money that arts and culture only partly capture. The contrast shows that how funds are raised shapes where corporate support ends up.

Read the original article in Korean: K trendy NEWS

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