Americans for the Arts

This article reports on how communities apply the elements of the four-point Main Street Approach and discusses factors contributing to their usage and effectiveness.

This article is concerned with to what extent may subsidies to artistic activities be justified by standard economic cost-benefit reasoning. The author concludes that the cultivation of taste and standard cost-benefit reasoning jointly support the conjecture that subsidies could be required to sustain efficient market equilibria, despite globally increasing marginal cost.

This article is a reply to F. F. Ridley's article Cultural economics and the culture of economists. The author traces the ways in which cultural economists have justified subsidies for the arts. He includes four major arguments for public support of the arts: efficiency, equity, formation of tastes, and merit goods. He counters the claims that economists ignore the emotional ties to the arts. Includes references.

This article examines the link between art and economics and the author argues that social and economic advances can be realized through the increased use of the arts. These benefits obtain from gains in the physical and social sciences that often yield substantial rewards in economic terms. The author maintains that the essence of scientific advancement comes through creativity and that the creative process is, to a large degree, stimulated by the arts.

This article examines the economic impact of the arts. While universities and the arts do not have identical economic effects, they possess certain similarities that are revealed in impact studies and that reflect the underlying assumptions of the economic impact approach. First, universities and the arts are not just good in themselves but are good for the economy. Second, their economic impact can be measured quantitatively. Third, the value of these contributions should be underscored since they are widely underappreciated. Fourth, the economic impact is a useful fact since the arts and

This article examines evidence on the recent growth and development of cultural organizations in New England and discusses the consequences for future trends in the economic health of cultural organizations in general. The data used came from two economic surveys of the region's nonprofit cultural organizations: the first in 1978, and a second, using the same methodology, in 1988. In both surveys, questionnaires were mailed to cultural organizations whose names and addresses were on master lists submitted by six New England state arts agencies. The organizations were requested to provide

This annual update of information from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis presents new data for 1988 and revises some data for 1986 and 1987 that was reported in note #30.

This annual update of information from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis presents new data for 1987 and revises some data for 1985 and 1986 that was reported in note #28. In addition to the updating material, similar to that in the previous notes about the GNP, several important findings with regard to the composition of this data series are described.

This annual update of information from the U.S. Bureau of Economic analysis presents new data for 1986 and revises some data for 1984 and 1985 that was reported in note #20. In addition to the updating material, similar to that in the previous notes about the GNP, an additional analysis is included for the first time in terms of per capita expenditures. This new analysis is presented in the form of a table showing current and constant dollar per capita expenditures for five recreation components of the GNP for 1983-1986.

This annual report of the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group that represents the interest of U.S. record companies, presents an overview of statistics, gathered from various sources, that document the sale and promotion of recordings. The sections on Congressional relations and state and local relations include a discussion of music and freedom of expression issues.

This annual report of the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group that represents the interest of U.S. record companies, presents an overview of statistics, gathered from various sources, that document the sale and promotion of recordings. The sections on Congressional relations and state and local relations include a discussion of music and freedom of expression issues.

This analysis suggests that while the staffing composition of performing arts organizations has been ignored in evaluation of their internal economies, consideration of the relative numbers of paid artists and administrators as well as of volunteers and unpaid artist leads to conclusions that are difference from those based solely on performance costs or artists' salaries. Greater economies of scale are observed for large organizations precisely because they attract people who donate their time or serve as apprentices.

There are many tribes of Philistines among us: for capitalist realists, dollar democracy should define taste; for egalitarian realists, artistic affirmative action should counter historical stereotyping; for relgious realists, religion should rule art; and, for socialist realists, collectivism should subsume aesthetics. For all such realists, art is a powerful technology for directed social change; it is not an independent, self-directed human activity with goals and standards of its own. And to such realists, those who daily stretch the creative envelope or revivify our collective past -

The Westside Economic Alliance and the Portland Development Commission co-sponsored this study which examines what young adults in the 25 to 34 year-old age group want from cities and how well communities in the Portland, Oregon metropolitan region are positioned to compete for this group.

The theory of unbalanced productivity growth, sometimes referred to as Baumol's disease, has been widely applied since Baumol and Bowen (1966) first used it to analyze the economic problems of the performing arts. The idea has generally been applied to non-profit arts such as the theater and ballet, rather than to profit-oriented enterprise. This paper applies the unbalanced productivity approach to a cultural activity produced for profit--the live performance of popular music. In particular, Baumol's disease provides an additional explanation for the shift in the dominant form of American