Abstract

The paper aims to review the expenditure on goods and services associated to culture in Italy in the last 30 years, with a special focus on the role of the demand for museums. Although it is widely assumed that the expenditure for culture has increased in Italy together with income and economic development, the evidence is that the share of goods and services related to culture has not changed since the '70s, with a percentage of total family consumption ranging from 6% to 7%. During the last 10 years the trend of expenditure increased slightly, due to the creation of new cultural markets, in which an integration between different products occurred and the web played an increasingly important role. The improvement in the supply of services within the museum visiting market also helped this trend, but the main driver was the increased number of international tourists, more than a wider basis of domestic consumers.