Arts and their impact on economic life

Abstract

The field of cultural economics is in a formal sense a recent development, beginning in the 1960s with the work of William Baumol and William Bowen in their book Performing arts: The economic dilemma, published in 1966. Independently scholars such as Alan Peacock and Mark Blaug in England and Michael O'Hare, J.M. Montias, William Hendon in the U.S. were working and by the early seventies there began to be a literature. The formation of the association for Cultural Economics in 1973 gave a modest platform to economists interested in the Arts, efforts which led to the initiation of the Journal of Cultural Economics in 1977. Having trailed along on the coat tails of other economics organizations previously, 1979 brought ACE to its first conference held in Edinburgh. In the same year, the Journal of Economic Literature made an exception to its policy of including no new journals and began indexing the JCE. Since those early days a large literature has rapidly developed, recognition of the field by various organizations such as the Ministry of CRM in Holland, the Arts councils in various countries, the Ministry of Culture in France along with the National Endowment for the Arts has come in the nature of support for activities of scholars in the field and cultural economics seems assured a place as a subfield of the economics profession. What the present paper attempts is to provide some insights into one part of the field of cultural economics, namely the urban development aspects of the arts as seen by economists. Other points of view could have been pursued because economists are busy at work on arts markets, national arts policy, cost demand, supply studies of arts organizations, industry studies, and a whole host of other applications from the larger field of economics. Thus, this paper reveals the thinking of only a small portion of the total field, but does provide a sense of the perspective which economists bring to the study of the arts.