On the role of cultural participation in tourism destination performance: an assessment using robust conditional efficiency approach

The relationship between culture and tourism has been widely investigated from different perspectives. A large strand of literature studies the role of cultural heritage to attract tourists, while a rich bulk of studies on cultural participation investigates the impact of tourism flows on the demand for culture. Another aspect worth investigating relates to the link between cultural participation and the performance of tourism destinations (TDs), as a higher cultural participation in an area could boost the performance in the management of tourism resources. However, so far, this issue has been disregarded in the literature, and this paper aims at filling this gap. Specifically, it studies the effect of cultural participation on TDs’ performance using a conditional efficiency approach that ensures robust inference on the role of environmental factors. We employ data on the Italian regions for the period 2004–2010, and we explore the role of cultural participation for tourism by using several indicators. Our findings offer empirical support to the positive role of cultural participation and, thus, suggest that public cultural policies might also boost the efficiency of the tourism sector.     

Cultural goods creation, cultural capital formation, provision of cultural services and cultural atmosphere accumulation

The cultural atmosphere in a society is accumulated over time through the consumption of cultural services and is diminished through depreciation. Using cultural capital (e.g., cultural heritage, paintings, music scores), cultural services are provided by the cultural-services industry (e.g., museums, opera houses); cultural capital is enlarged by new cultural goods created by individuals. Individuals’ utilities are positively affected by the cultural services they consume, by the cultural goods they create and by the cultural atmosphere and the cultural capital accumulated in society. In a laissez-faire economy, individuals tend to ignore the positive external effects of their cultural-services consumption and creation of cultural goods on other individuals via accumulating cultural atmosphere and cultural capital. Consequently, suboptimally little cultural atmosphere and cultural capital will be accumulated. The efficient intertemporal allocation can be restored by introducing an appropriate subsidy that not only stimulates consumers’ demand for cultural services and the creation of new cultural goods but also enhances the accumulation of cultural atmosphere and cultural capital.

Cultural and Sport Economics: Conceptual Twins?

Is there a role for sports economics in arts research? Despite references to similarities between the arts and sports (especially community impacts, demand interdependencies, and the presence of superstars), the two burgeoning literatures operate in near isolation from one another. This parochialism is not justified by legitimate distinctions; arts labor analysis, in particular, could benefit from sports research. This paper demonstrates this proposition with a focus on: team production functions and income dispersion; unions and rent distribution; managerial and director productivity; earnings functions and changing talent distributions related to competing superstar theories; and career development, screening and human capital theory.     

Economics of music publishing: copyright and the market

The paper argues that the paradigmatic shift from the sale of printed music to exploiting and managing musical rights that took place in music publishing during the early years of the twentieth century was due to the changing market rather than to changes in copyright law. On the one hand, copyright law was ineffectual in controlling piracy throughout the nineteenth century, and on the other hand, performing rights were ignored by music publishers for over 70 years; these points suggest that copyright was not the main reason behind the success of the industry. Rather than leading entrepreneurially (the current view of dynamism in the creative industries), publishers ‘followed the money’ and adapted their business models only when new streams of income from new forms of exploitation through sound recording, broadcasting and film became available as a result of exogenous technical progress. Publishers were locked-in to sales revenue as their business model, though when switching to the new business model of rights management took place, the costs seem not to have been greatly significant. The paper takes an historical approach to the development of music publishing viewed through the lens of present-day issues. The research has resonance for the transition from sales to licensing digital works that is taking place in the creative industries today and puts into perspective the relative significance of market forces and copyright law in the process.     

The Economics of Museums: A Research Perspective

This paper examines the contribution economic analysis can make to the study of museums as productive organisations, and considers some related policy issues. The paper also suggests areas where research by economists might prove most fruitful.     

Methodological Individualism and Cultural Economics

This paper considers the communitarian critique of the method of economics, especially in regard to its methodological individualism, with reference in particular to cultural economics. It asks whether cultural goods can be modelled in a meaningful way under the usual assumptions in neoclassical economics about individual economic agents. Special attention is paid to Charles Taylor's critique of 'atomism', and his suggestion that some goods are 'irreducibly social'. The implications of the critique for (1) public funding of the arts, and (2) copyright policy, are considered.     

Municipal elections and cultural expenditure

The aim of this paper is to analyze the effect of electoral timing on municipal public cultural spending. We use a panel sample of all municipalities from the Spanish Region of Murcia for 1995–2008. Our results reveal that mayors adopt an opportunistic behavior, increasing cultural spending in the election year and reducing it in the second year after the election. We also investigate whether the electoral cycle in cultural spending is influenced by mayors’ ideology, political strength, willingness to run for re-election, and electoral competitiveness. In this regard, our study shows that when mayors expect close elections, political budget cycles’ size is greater. Concerning political leadership, the magnitude of the electoral cycle is influenced by mayors’ political ideology rather than mayors’ political strength and re-election willingness. Additionally, we seek to shed some light on the determinants of public cultural spending. We find that income and upper-level governments’ transfers have a positive impact on cultural spending. Finally, unemployment, young people’s proportion and elderly people’s proportion negatively influence cultural spending.     

Assessing cultural values: developing an attitudinal scale

Effective measurement of cultural value is often elusive because of its multidimensional nature. It is also influenced by sociodemographic characteristics (manifest variables) and attitudinal characteristics (latent variables) of populations. While the former is easily available to researchers, the latter has not been fully studied. This paper suggests the use of a cultural worldview scale that was developed to measure cultural attitudes of people, using factor and cluster analysis. Four factors comprise the scale: cultural linkages, recognition of cultural values, cultural loss and preservation of traditions and customs. Some advantages of using this scale are demonstrated, and relationships with sociodemographic variables are investigated. Managerial and policy implications are discussed.