An Economic Analysis of Cultural Consumption

Cultural consumptions can foster economic development and human wellbeing thank to several positive externalities linked to growth of human capital and capabilities of complex interactions. Demand for cultural goods exhibit several special features, like rational addiction related to past consumption and the link with human capital and the mixed role of final good and investment good. Using micro data from an Istat survey with 50.000 cases I estimate an econometric model for the demand of main cultural goods that show several complementarities among them. As expected schooling exhibit correlation while time consuming activities like television viewing and Internet surfing has showed mixed results. The overlapping among different cultural consumptions appears to be fairly low. If we take concert, theatre and museum in the last 12 months only 4,8 % participated at least once in all three activities, a not so high threshold of cultural consumption compared with 45% of the population over 15 that consume at least one of them. Contrary to many beliefs the heavy consumer does not play a pivotal role in many cultural goods. People attending more than 7 times per year in each of concert, theatre or museum represent a share of total tickets ranging from 28% to 33%. That result could be important to address public policies to increase cultural consumption more toward casual consumer.