Unlike in Europe and Australia, the Japanese central government is relatively uninvolved in cultural funding, and there is little to incentivise private philanthropy. So how do they manage?
- Professor of Economics, RMIT University
One of my Phd students is studying how parents make decisions about education for their children (you can participate in his survey here). We economists treat this as a problem of investment under uncertainty…
It’s a common refrain among the “dries” in any government that arts and cultural policy should set its course by the lights of economic policy, usually competition, growth and innovation policy. Sometimes…
Sometimes things that are pretty simple for most people can seriously confuse an economist. The heat over the ABC cuts is a good example of the blurry line between economics – and the economics of politics…
Malcolm Turnbull’s well-telegraphed announcement yesterday that the ABC’s funding will be cut by A$254 million over five years is no surprise. But, broken election promise aside, this is actually something…
The warmest, most welcoming home of cultural nationalism is appeal to the provenance of “our stories”. Real Australian stories are made by Australians, for Australians, using only Australians, and only…
The arts economy by-and-large replicates the rest of the economy in its structures, complexity and diversity. There is a craft-based core unchanged for eons and a dynamic middle made up of more or less…
Do the words we use to speak of economic matters, matter? I believe they do, but not by the propagation of textbookish jargon. Rather, the main way they matter is in shaping public ethics. Economics has…
Regular readers of this column will know that I’m neither an artist nor a cultural expert, but something much more déclassé: I’m a cultural economist. Part of this involves studying the incentives that…
Economics sometimes has surprising applications. One example is the Alchian-Allen theorem, an observation that came from a footnote in an economics textbook in the 1960s about how quality demand is affected…
Even before the announcement of the 2014 budget by Australian Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey tonight, there were “budget bad news” leaks flying around in the media. So what do we know now? The as-yet-unspecified…
In the lead-up to the budget, the story of crisis has been hammered home, but there’s more to a country than its structural deficit. So how is Australia doing overall? In this special series, ten writers…
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the public funding of arts and culture will cause political strife. Reasonable people just do not agree on this, and can be surprisingly quick to accuse others…
Over the past 20 years the size of government spending has grown, both absolutely and as a percentage of GDP. Public sector debt has also increased substantially. The cautionary tale of Greece indicates…
A little economics can go a long way, and that is certainly true when thinking about good jobs and bad jobs, and specifically whether some sectors have better jobs than others. This is sometimes framed…
Luca Belgiorno-Nettis’s family contributed A$600,000 toward the A$10 million budget of this year’s Sydney Biennale (Australia’s largest outdoor arts festival), continuing a long family tradition of generous…
On Sunday, legendary singer Bob Dylan was the face and voice of the 2014 America Super Bowl commercials, lending his voice to Chobani and the Chrysler 200 advertisers. So Bob Dylan now writes songs to…
Prizes are a common feature on the cultural economy landscape. In Australia there is the famous Archibald Prize for portraiture, there are numerous prizes for literature and poetry, the AFI Awards in film…
A recent paper by five mathematical computer scientists at Indiana University (published in EMBO Reports, a forum for short papers in molecular biology) proposes a clever new model for science funding…
James Cameron is going to film the next three instalments of the Avatar franchise in New Zealand. He promises to spend at least NZ$500 million, employ thousands of Kiwis, host at least one red-carpet event…
What’s new in public finance you ask? Social impact bonds, that’s what. This is the leading edge of the social finance revolution. It just might make a big difference to Indigenous and remote Australia…
There is currently much ballyhoo – in the Murdoch Press at least – about the release of secret files on the salaries paid to the top talent at our ABC. Tony Jones, for instance, pulls down A$355,789, making…
So two things happened. First, Crown Resorts Limited – whose Executive Chairman is James Packer – was awarded an exclusive license by NSW State Premier Barry O’Farrell to operate the A$1.5 billion Barangaroo…
One basic difference between economists and the rest of the human population is how you answer the following question: What is the purpose of higher education? A non-cynical normal person answer is learning…
Last year the Australian Bureau of Statistics did the maths – government spends about A$7 billion annually in Australia on arts and culture. The exact dollar figure varies depending on what we count, but…
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