Performance of cultural heritage institutions

Abstract

the promotion, defence and conservation of cultural heritage are the aims of a wide number of institutions, both private and public that directly, or indirectly are managing increasing human, economic and financial resources. as we will see below, cultural heritage institutions are predominantly not market oriented, and the public sector is their main source of financing. they are often beyond the control of the market, which imposes efficient behaviour when competitive. therefore, their internal logic does not ensure economic efficiency. However, achieving the best performance is crucial because public resources are limited nowadays and have a rising opportunity cost. looking for the best performance, and if possible, discovering new ways to improve it, is an optimal strategy both for the financing and the operational institutions. the goal of this chapter is to analyse how the performance of these institutions can be evaluated, not to measure the different values associated with cultural heritage (see throsby, 2001). We need to begin by defining the output of these institutions, i.e. those components of cultural heritage that can be measured and can be objects of efficiency analysis. the answer to these questions will determine what institutions can be evaluated because what is good (or bad) performance is not independent of the nature and objectives of the institutions involved. However, the concept of cultural heritage is extraordinarily wide and has been changing in the last decades, from considering monuments and groups of buildings and sites to including new categories such as the intangible, ethnographic or industrial heritage of a culture’s remains.1 We wish to contribute to this discussion by designing a framework that answers all these questions from an economic point of view, and this aim defines the structure of this essay. in the next section, we try to centre our aims and discuss some questions. in the following two sections we define economic efficiency and discuss the possible sources of inefficiency among cultural heritage institutions. then two sections discuss the main method-