Americans for the Arts

The author applies the Baumol and Bowen's model of the performing arts to the economic and financial history of the Opera de Paris

The 185 page report is based on research funded by the Monument Trust, with some additional funding from the former Department of National Heritage. The report draws upon reviews of existing literature, analysis of secondary data on employment and audiences, and specially commissioned research, to provide a comprehensive overview of the operations of the cultural sector. Specifically, it examines the distribution of cultural sector support from the public, private and voluntary sectors and charts the spread of activity across the UK; it sets out to establish the relationship between these

Review by Andrew Feist of the book Singers in the Marketplace: The Economics of the Singing Profession [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, 252 p.].

Review by Andrew Feist of the book Cultural Economics and Cultural Policies [Dordrecht: Luwer Academic Publishers, 1994, 184 p.]

Paper presented at the Third International Conference on Cultural Economics and Planning held April 25-28, 1984, in Akron, Ohio

It's not just the $17 billion kids spend each year on everything from computer software to candy, or even the $170 billion adults spend at their behest that markets are after. In addition to those 187 billion excellent reasons, marketers are targeting kids because demographers tell them they should. By way of comparison, in 1995 the total amount spent in the U.S. on public education was $243.7 billion.

In this paper, the author develops two main issues. Firstly, the author identifies the nature of the social and economic benefits that investment in the arts might bring to a local region. Secondly, the author suggests that the magnitude of these social effects can be measured, and that appraisal of local investments in this and similar areas can use the results of research into the demand for public goods, in particular by attempting to measure the community's willingness to pay for such goods and by incorporating these measurements into a cost-benefit calculus.

In this paper the author considers some of the general problems of interpreting quality in the demand and supply of performing arts services. The author proposes a simple firm-based model of an exchange system for performing arts services in which quality enters specifically. The implications of the demand side of this model are then explored using data for three Sydney theatre companies.

In this market study, sixteen cultural products were examined. These products were chosen on the basis of two criteria. First, they had to be popular enough so that they could be evaluated by a majority of consumers. Second, each product had to be sufficiently different from the other fifteen in order to generate a large variety of positioning. Descriptive adjectives were generated which were used for the affective evaluations of the products. Based on that review, seventeen adjectives were initially retained and a contingency table was submitted to a correspondence analysis. The

In the face of a decline in the market of the U.K. cinema industry, the author examines the question on how cinema outlets should conduct themselves economically so long as there are sufficient profits to preclude total shutdown in the industry. How higher or lower ticket prices should go to improve profitability is the question posed in this article.

In the case of India, while the inhibiting role of social and cultural barriers to the development of technology has often been stressed, the paper attempts to show that the major barriers to the development of technology in the post-Independence period can be said to be substantially delved from prevailing economic policies associated with import substitution, industrial development and other major economic policy considerations. (p. 73-4)

In a model of pricing performances in which demand is uncertain but not dependent on cultivated tastes, the optimal contingent pricing schedule is alway to charge all the market will bear. However, if demand is both uncertain and cultivated, an optimal strategy mall call for nonprice rationing in states of exceptionally high demand. This provides an efficiency rationale both for anti-scalping laws and for the failure of nonprofit performing arts organization always to charge all the market will bear.

Ideas: The Business of Culture.
America's Stake in the Arts by Roger L. Stevens.
Where the Dollars Go by Martin Mayer.
The Artist as Uneconomic Man by Russell Lynes.
A New Mission for Business by George A. Spater.

How could two cities (Florence and Siena) of such apparently similar ethnic, religious, political, and social backgrounds provide such divergent artistic traditions of such long duration in such close proximity? It is the purpose of this paper to examine this question with the perspective of economic theory. Section I describes the economic model of monopsony. Section II and III apply this model to the arts markets in Florence and Siena between 1300 and 1500. A final section compares the results and offers some generalizations. (p. 34)

Gathering a set of roughly compatible statistics for the costs and incomes of performing arts organizations in the then USSR and the USA, this paper provides a summary and analysis of that data. It is found that there is a considerable difference between the very high share of income earned at the box office by musical performances in the USSR compared to the USA. In addition, artistics salaries make a far smaller share of total musical costs in the USSR then in the USA, although its share in the USA is declining. Both government and private sources, as shares of total income, were similar