As the Scottish arts world waits with bated breath for its funding announcement from Creative Scotland this week, Dundee's breath is more bated than most.

In Dundee over the past few years, the arts have become a central economic driver.

Dundee Contemporary Arts, opened in the same year as the Scottish Parliament, has spurred a strategy that is now bringing our first National arts Institution to the City; the Victoria and Albert design museum, to our glistening waterfront. So many of the city's economic plans for the future hinge on our cultural regeneration.

From new figures this week we know that now only around half of our working-age population are in employment. Still, to our shame, one in four children lives in poverty in this city. Last year, as part of efforts to address this, Dundee put its heart and soul into a bid to bring UK City of Culture 2017 to Dundee. We were beaten by Hull - apparently they had more need.

The Scottish Government committed resources to letting us realise some of the 2017 plans. No money has come yet, despite Inverness securing similar funds after losing out on the same bid a few years back.

The answer I always get in Parliament to questions about funding for Dundee, from every government minister I ask, is the same; Dundee is getting the V&A. However, analysing the Government's own figures on arts funding, it becomes very clear that per head, Dundee has been getting a raw deal for years on cultural spending in relation to Edinburgh and Glasgow.

We are now, not before time, getting our first national institution, the V&A. National institutions, the National Portrait Gallery, the National Museum etc are paid for from a separate funding pot different from the Creative Scotland fund.

So hosting the V&A, Scotland's national design museum in Dundee is no reason at all to reduce our share of funds that will be announced next week.

That logic doesn't work for Edinburgh and Glasgow so shouldn't be applied to us either.

According to Creative Scotland's funding archive in 2013-14, Dundee received £26.27 less per head than Edinburgh, and £12.55 less spending per head than Glasgow.

Regionally in 2013-14, the Tayside area received £10.21 per head, with the wider Glasgow region receiving more than double, and the Lothians more than three times this figure.

The government may argue that the capital project investment in Tayside and Dundee City, because of the £15 million invested in the V&A, outbalance this spending to leave Dundee with more overall.

But if you add capital spending and Creative Scotland funding together, it shows that in 2013-14 Tayside (£29.75 per head) still lags majorly behind the Lothians (£34.32) and the wider Strathclyde region (£41.42).

Even more startling is the regional distribution of funding since 2011 - while the Lothians received a whopping £161.15 per head, and wider Glasgow £75.76 per head, Tayside has only received £45.48.

So when the announcements come later this week, I will be expecting an investment in our core cultural institutions in Dundee - Dundee Rep, Dundee Contemporary Arts, and the Scottish Dance Theatre that bolster our city's strategy to culturally regenerate our city.

Our city has lived for years without the extra economic and cultural gift that is a national institution. And now that we're getting one, we need, more than ever, its cultural building blocks and all the innovative and valuable community cultural engagement that they bring, to flourish further and take the lead in building audiences for the V&A both inside and outside the City.

For years, as the Government's figures show, Dundee has built its cultural economy on a poor man's share of the pot. Now, as we reach for the stars, it is not the time to pull our ladders away. We deserve and demand the same treatment as Edinburgh and Glasgow, and will settle for nothing less.