Education and culture: evidence from live performing arts in Italy (original) (raw)

The demand for live performing arts in Italy

Journal of Cultural Economics, 1990

W•t.at is the role of demand in the definition of public policies for he performing arts? Empirical research on consumers' behavior and the efficiency of public expenditure in the performing arts is likely to expand in Italy in the near future as an effort to find answers to the above question. The work we present here, where we try to model and estimate a demand function for live performing arts (1), has to be understood as one of these first attempts.

Culture and the youngest. Insights for the future of cultural consumption from an Italian sample

Il Capitale Culturale: Studies on the Value of Cultural Heritage, 2021

The paper explores the cultural consumption of teenagers, seen as consumers not yet independent from an economic point of view, but already independent in the choice and tastes. Our results apply to a sample of about 350 students living in the Cuneo province, in North-West of Italy, through a cluster analysis approach. Young consumers can be segmented into four homogeneous groups according to the level of consumption in five cultural sectors (music, cinema, museum, performing art, books) and the degree of direct engagement in cultural practices. There are significant differences in their cultural consumptions, family and individual cultural capital, school results and sports engagement. The cultural expenditure is differentiated accordingly. The existence of different cultural consumption clusters highlights the need, both for policy-makers and cultural industries, to better understand the next generation of adults, thus suggesting the importance to start a proper data collection at...

The Demand for Theatre. A Microeconomic Approach to the Italian Case

2011

This paper examines theatre participation in Italy over the period [1995][1996][1997][1998][1999][2000][2001][2002][2003][2004][2005][2006]. Explanatory variables are determined by identifying their contributions to both the individual's decision to attend, and the frequency of attendance. Socio-demographic and socio-economic characteristics, cultural capital, participation in other cultural activities, ticket price and theatre supply are taken into account. Three different models are used: the logistic regression model, the ordered logistic regression model and the finite mixture model. In the first two cases the contribution of each variable is not so different, in the case of finite mixture model the significance of the variables is not the same in the two components. For instance, the variable education, a proxy for cultural capital, is always significant in determining participation, but not in frequency of participation. In general, our results show that participation is not specific to a particular theatrical event since people who attend one arts activity are more likely to attend others. Finally, our results show that traditional socio-economic variables such as income and education are highly correlated with participation in the arts.

Cultural Well-Being and GDP Per Capita in Italy: Empirical Evidence

Quality of Life and Quality of Working Life, 2017

Social and cultural participation has always been a means to promote high economic growth and the development of the individual in a given society. Public and private institutions often try to make available efforts and resources to promote the usability of free time and social participation. This paper uses data from the multipurpose survey on Italian households, conducted by the Italian Institute of Statistics, and it analyses the relationship between cultural capability and the income and economic means of Italian households through the construction of a composite indicator of cultural well-being. The analysis of the individual indicators of education and cultural participation makes it possible to study issues related to the development of social capital in the northern and southern areas, thus highlighting the gap and enabling the decision-maker to apply possible corrections.

The Demand and Supply for Popular Culture: Evidence from Italian Circuses

Italian Economic Journal, 2019

Despite an extensive empirical literature on the determinants of cultural consumption, few studies focus on the demand for popular forms of culture (i.e. reality television, popular music, yellow journalism, among the others). The purpose of this paper is to fill this lacuna by analysing the market for circus, a worldwide popular performing art. To this aim, a demand-supply model is investigated using data on 107 Italian provinces over the period 2006-2007, by applying the SUR and the 3SLS methodologies. Findings confirm the economic theory, since price is negatively correlated with the quantity demanded and positively with the quantity supplied. According to our results circus is an inferior good. This result show that high and popular culture are far from competing each other. Cinema, theatre and concerts turn out to be feeble substitute goods for circus. Circuses in the South and Islands of Italy are characterised by longer stays in a single location probably due to higher appreciation for circus performances and favourable climate conditions. Since the determinants of popular culture demand are find to be different from those of high culture, our findings can be useful for policy makers to implement policies finalised to social inclusion and social cohesion.

The evolution of theatre attendance in Italy: patrons and companies

This paper examines the Italian theatre market from both the demand and supply side. The descriptive analysis shows that the Italian theatre market is, mainly, localized in the Northern and Central Italian regions for both patrons and companies, confirming a cultural divide between the Southern and the rest of the Italian regions also in the theatrical sector. Like many other European countries, the performing arts in Italy are subsided by public funds through the so-called Fondo Unico per lo Spettacolo (FUS), thereby influencing theatre performance and attendance. As expected, the distribution of the FUS follows the localization of the theatrical companies. The empirical analysis is conducted using 34-year panel data (1980-2013) for the 20 Italian regions. By applying the seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) estimation technique, we identify the factors influencing theatre demand and supply. The estimated results confirm as determinants of theatre demand, price and consumer income ...

The changing role of education as we move from popular to highbrow culture

Journal of Cultural Economics, 2019

Education is the socioeconomic variable that has the greatest impact on cultural participation. A higher level of education leads to greater interest and taste for culture increasing the demand of culture. But education can also indirectly affect cultural consumption because the higher the level of education, the higher the expected income and, therefore, the greater the cultural consumption. In this paper, we analyze the effect of education on cultural consumption once the impact of income is controlled for. Using information on attendance to cinema, performing arts and visits to sites of cultural interest, we analyze how the effect of education changes between these activities. To do so, we estimate a Zero Inflated Ordered Probit using the 2006 and 2015 Spanish modules of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions. We find that the effect of education varies between activities, being its marginal effect more relevant for highbrow activities than for popular culture. On the contrary, given a certain level of education, an increase in income will bring more people to the cinema than to theaters or museums. This result is consistent with the idea that highbrow cultural consumption involves the comprehension of more complex symbolic elements, and individuals' decoding abilities depend more on education than on income.

Can cultural education crowd out arts subsidization

2002

The debate about whether the arts should be supported or not is far from being recent, and most governments support the arts in one way or the other. The literature considers several arguments in favor of such interventions. Education may seem as an action which could, in the long run, lead to possible reductions of subsidies. Surveys show that those who have been exposed to the arts when young, participate more when adult. However, the "non-market" transmission from parents to children, generates an external effect, which has to be taken into account to reach first-best situations. We construct an overlapping generations model in which young consumers are exposed to both public education towards the arts and transmission of such a taste from their parents and show that the first-best can be reached only if there is both public cultural education and subsidization of arts consumption. Education can, therefore, not be considered as a substitute for subsidies to arts consumption though the situations that prevail in most European countries point to subsidizing education, while consumption, especially of the older generations, should be taxed rather than subsidized.