Tiziana Cuccia

Is cultural heritage really important for tourists? A contingent rating study

In this article we present the results of a contingent rating study carried out on a sample of tourisits visiting Scicli, a Sicilian town known for its baroque heritage. In particular, we focus on different attributes of tourism products – namely, season, accommodation and cultural heritage – to study how much each of these attributes weights in tourists’ preferences. We also study how the socio-demographic characteristics of people affect their evaluation of the different attributes of tourism products. The heritage endowment appears to be far from being the most important factor; this result is consistent across different socio-demographic subgroups of interviewed persons.

Museum and monument attendance and tourism flow: a time series analysis approach.

This article takes a time-series analysis approach to evaluate the directions of causality between tourism flows, on the one side, and museum and monument attendance, on the other. We consider Italy as a case study, and analyse monthly data over the period January 1996 to December 2010. All the considered series are seasonally integrated, and co-integration links emerge. We focus on the error-correction mechanism among co-integrated time series to detect the directional link(s) of causality. Clear-cut results emerge: bi-directional causality exists in the long-run dynamics, but it is the long-run dynamics of visits to museums and monuments that mainly adjust to tourism variables (arrivals, overnights, average stays). In the short run, there are some causal effects going from the cultural sites’ attendance to tourism dynamics. The nonstationary nature of time series, their co-integration relationships and the direction of causal links suggest specific implications for tourism and cultural policies.

The Supply of Arts Labour : Towards a Dynamic Approach

Earlier work on the supply of labour of artists has shown that, whenever workers derive satisfaction from the process of work, which is usually the case for artists, some traditional results are reversed. As their proponents make clear this analysis is essentially static, as it does not take into account the intertemporal dimension of the supply of labour. The paper argues that to provide such a dynamic analysis three routes are available: the human capital approach, the household production approach and the evolutionary approach. The paper, therefore, is aimed at discussing the adequacy of various theoretical approaches to the treatment of a specific question.

UNESCO sites and performance trend of Italian regional tourism destinations: A two-stage DEA window analysis with spatial interaction

This article analyzes the role of United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) sites on the enhancement of tourism destinations (TDs) performance, taking the Italian regions over the period 1995–2010 as a case study. Specifically, we aim at studying the effect of the inscription in the World Heritage List (WHL) upon the dynamics of the efficiency of the Italian regions as TDs. We use a two-stage data envelopment analysis window analysis, to detect efficiency trends and resort to both semiparametric pooled-truncated and panel data estimators to evaluate the determinants of the efficiency changes in TDs over time. Moreover, we test for the presence of spatial dependence in the efficiency of TDs. The results reveal that the WHL does not play a significant role in enhancing technical efficiency of TDs. These empirical findings are robust to alternative estimators and model specifications. Furthermore, the spatial analysis does not reveal significant spillover effects in the efficiency of TDs.

Collective Trademarks and Cultural Districts: The Case of San Gregorio Armeno, Naples

This book analyses the economic development of cities from the ‘cultural economy’ and ‘creative industry’ perspectives, examining and differentiating them as two related but distinct segments of contemporary city economies. The authors argue that although they are normally conflated, the first is largely subsidized while the second is highly entrepreneurial hence they actually make very different kinds of contribution to a city’s character, attractiveness and competitiveness.

IS IT WORTH BEING INSCRIBED IN THE WORLD HERITAGE LIST? A CASE STUDY OF "THE BAROQUE CITIES IN VAL DI NOTO" (SICILY)

This article deals with the effects of the inscription of a cultural site which is contained in the UNESCO World Heritage List (WHL); in particular, it focuses on the case of the “Baroque cities in Val di Noto” (Sicily, Italy), which is a serial site, constituted by a large number of towns that share the same architectural style and are located in a large area that includes eight municipalities. We discuss whether the model of the “cultural district” is appropriate enough to describe the experience of Val di Noto. More specifically, we analyze the impact of the inscription to the WHL on creative industries and tourism flows. We observe that the most relevant effects occurred in the years around the inscription (2002) and suggest that the difficulties in maintaining sustained economic growth in more recent years rest in the limited enforcement power of the UNESCO resolutions and in the limited coordination among different layers of government.

Seasonal processes in the Euro–US Dollar daily exchange rate

We analyse the pattern of daily Euro–US Dollar exchange rate from the birth of Euro, in January 1999, until December 2012. This series is I(1), as is usual for nominal bilateral exchange rates; however, it is far from following a random walk process. We find evidence of the presence of day effects, even if they play a more limited role as compared to other exchange rates observed over previous periods of time. More surprisingly, we find statistical significance of some month effects in the first-differences of exchange rate, and strong variation in their variance across months. Hence, monthly seasonality in daily Euro–US Dollar exchange rate cannot be overlooked, and some explanations are suggested.

Does Unesco inscription affect the performance of tourism destinations? A regional perspective

This paper analyses the role of tourism in the enhancement of local development focusing on the role of UNESCO World Heritage List (WHL) as attractor of tourism demand. It aims at evaluating the performance of the Italian regions as tourism destinations in the period 1995-2010, using the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) two-stage approach. In the first stage the efficiency scores are calculated using a smoothed DEA bootstrap procedure to generate unbiased technical efficiency estimates. In the second stage a robust semi-parametric regression is employed to assess the impact of the WHL inscription on the efficiency of tourism destinations in the short and in the long term. The empirical results show that, controlling for several environmental factors, the presence of UNESCO sites is negatively correlated to the technical efficiency of tourist destinations. Our explanation for such a result is that WHL inscription raises expectations which are not met by an equivalent increase of tourism flows: this has to be taken in account by policy-makers in the design of the local strategies to promote tourist destinations and therefore to foster local development.

Are Less Public Funds Bad? New Strategies for Art Providers

Public budget constraints reduce the public funding available to art providers (AP). This ‘bad news’ is likely to impose radical changes in their strategies and it may as well give them a chance to re-think their mission in line with the new set of incentives they face. AP might try to exploit new market opportunities, enlarge the scope of their production and incorporate other non-market-oriented objectives. Strategies range from an additional supply of a specific type of art product (live artistic performances, visual arts exhibitions, etc.) to the supply of a larger variety of products and services, including educational activities for social inclusion. They can also benefit from making their business more profitable, and generate positive externalities that can be appreciated by a larger part of the local community and favour social cohesion.

Are Exchange Rates Really Free from Seasonality? An ExploratoryAnalysis on Monthly Time Series

This article questions the assumption that exchange rates are non-seasonal and provides selected evidence of monthly time series of exchange rates in which significant seasonal components are present. However, the seasonal component appears to be absent in more recent data. Tentative explanations are suggested.