Government Grants to Private Cultural Institutions?The Effects of a Change in the Italian Legislation

Abstract

In Italy, the Regular Grant is the most important subsidy to private cultural institutions. Since 1996, law 534/96 has regulated its provision. This law greatly improves on the previous legislation, as it redefines the prerequisites to become a recipient and specifies performance indicators to which the size of the grant must be tied. This paper examines the effects of the introduction of the new law, the characteristics of the government choice process and the redistribution profile of these grants using a variety of estimating techniques on official data gathered for the purpose.

Public provision vs. outsourcing of cultural services: Evidence from Italian cities

“…1 The choice between supplying in-house produced cultural services and supporting external cultural organizations has been analyzed almost exclusively in a political economy context studying how di◆erent systems of direct support a◆ect allocation decisions of public funds. The literature highlights that continental Europe's experience has generally been more oriented towards in-house production of cultural services 1 Some studies have focused on the holdup e ect of public subsidies (Bises and Padovano 2004) or on their substitution or complementarity with private funding (Brooks 2000;Borgonovi and O'Hare 2004).…”

Museum finances: challenges beyond economic crises

“…(1) Tax deduction or tax relief regulations for donations and sponsorship, as does the levels of indirect and direct public support to the sector vary significantly across countries (Hughes and Luksetich 1999;Schuster 1999;Leclair and Gordon 2000;Negussie 2006;McIsaac 2007;Hughes and Luksetich 2008;Rushton 2008). Overall public and private support to the museum sector has increased in the last decades, apart from a period in the early 1990s (Bises and Padovano 2004;Bodo and Spada 2004;Selwood 2001;Månsson 2008), and it is clear that both reductions in support to the sector as well as increases are politically guided (Moen 1997).…”