Causality and Museum Subsidies

David Maddison

Journal of Cultural Economics, 2004, vol. 28, issue 2, 89-108

Abstract: Although museums are major recipients of public money, very little is known regarding what factors cause changes in the level of funding given to particular institutions. It is nevertheless regularly asserted by those affected that governments will reduce the level of subsidy going to those museums that raise revenues for themselves, especially if these revenues were raised through charging for admission. This paper explores the causal influences underlying changes in the level of government grants to museums. Statistically analysing data drawn from a panel of UK museums funded by central government, evidence is found that increases in non-grant income do indeed result in a statistically significant reduction in future government subsidies. It is however unclear whether these reductions are sufficient to offset entirely the financial benefits from charging or the pursuit of private benefactors. Despite the government's avowed intention to widen access to museums, changes in visitor numbers do not appear to cause changes in government grants. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2004

Keywords: causality; crowding out; museums; subsidies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1023/B:JCEC.0000019515.96628.f5 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jculte:v:28:y:2004:i:2:p:89-108

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10824/PS2

DOI: 10.1023/B:JCEC.0000019515.96628.f5

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Cultural Economics is currently edited by Federico Etro and Douglas Noonan

More articles in Journal of Cultural Economics from Springer, The Association for Cultural Economics International Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().