Measuring the Unmeasured: Cultural Heritage Studies in Honor of Prof. Francesco Forte

This paper presents the contributions of Francesco Forte to the measurement of art and cultural goods and services, as I worked with him as his co-author. These contributions range from the valuation of art goods by the art matrix we conceived, to the valuation of the cultural welfare of nations, regions and local communities. Our work also assessed the provision of cultural welfare at the national, regional and local level for the public and non-profit sectors and measured the efficiency and effectiveness of museum bureaucracies. We also studied the profitability of investments in the arts by considering product life cycles, artistic movements and economies. More recently, with Michele Caputo, we focused on the long-run life cycle and success of the movie industry for select countries competing with foreign movie industries and TV entertainment by adopting Caputo’s fractional derivatives theory, which captures the role of past history. Professor Forte and I also developed the Differential Touristic Development Index to measure the effects of art and cultural enterprises as tourist attractions. The most innovative contributions of Francesco Forte to the measurement of the economic value of cultural goods and services demonstrate that it is possible to “measure the unmeasured,” and therein improve public collection of statistical data with the goal of increasing the preservation and valuation of cultural goods and services and highlighting their potential as economic multipliers.     

Cross-Cultural Consumer Behavior: Use of Local Language for Market Communication—A Study in Region Friuli Venetia Giulia (Italy)

Cross-cultural consumer behavior is of market interest due to globalization of marketplaces, migration, multicultural marketplaces, and diffusion in the EU of many languages. The objective of this study is to check whether the local language used in a marketing communication could affect the consumers’ preferences for food products. The theoretical foundation is the consumer motivational approach that goes deeper into motivations interfering with the consumers’ preference order. The multivariate conjoint analysis is used to evaluate the preferences for attributes described in different languages. A number of students from the University of Udine (located in the northeastern part of Italy) have been submitted to interviews to examine their preferences for a simulated sandwich package reporting information in different languages, distributed by vendor machine. The results suggest that the consumer’s reaction to local language depends on sociodemographic profile, cultural background, language knowledge, and family education, and the local language could actually be used as a market tool for market segmentation. These results are of interest to many EU countries with bilingual communities such as Spain, Belgium, the UK, Switzerland, and most of the Italian regions where local languages are still alive.     

Pahl and Lojkine on the state: a comment

La relation entre i'état et le développement social peut entre analysée à partir de trois niveaux interconnectés:

• 1 Au niveau de la théorie et de la méthodologie. C'est ce que font Lojkine et Pahl.
• 2 A un niveau général, mais concernant des types théoriquement differenciés d'organisations sociales (c'est à dire, sociétés capitalistes avancées, sociététés socialistes. etc.). C'est le niveau qui concerne cet auteur le plus.
• 3 Au niveau d'une société donnée, durant une période historique déterminéee. C'est à ce niveau que les autres travaux de Lojkine ont été faits.

La critique faite par Pahl des perspectives marxistes est rejetés comme étant superficielle, par contre il est reconnu que i'?uvre de Poulantzas manque de perspective historique et dialectique. Mais i'analyse marxiste des institutions politiques dépend d'une interprétation correcte de la relation entre structure et superstructure, et ce point est développé par i'auteur. Une critique est faite des théories élitistes et historicistes. La typologie historiciste de Runciman est considérée comme étant inadéquate, car elle ne peut ětre appliquée à la réalité historique, et en dernier lieu, ne peut expliquer pourquoi les relations état-société montrent tant de variations. Les définitions marxistes de i'état sont insuffisantes et ont besoin d'ětre dévéloppées. A propos, les travaux de Lojkine et de Poulantzas sont critiqués comme étant réductivistes et non-dialectiques. La question des origines sociales de la démocratie est introduite afin de développer une perspective analytique satisfaisante qui pourrait prendre en compte les faits historiques des révolutions nationales en Europe de l'Ouest, au Japon et aux Etats-Unis. L'accent est mis sur le role de la classe ouvrière, le concept d'hégémonie, l'exercise du pouvoir hégémonique, et plus précisement quand la classe hégémonique n'est pas dominante. Une bonne analyse marxiste des relations état-société doit pouvoir envisager les tendences et les conditions actuelles de l'accumulation du capital, en conjonction avec les intérěts des groupes monopolistes. Cet essai fini par une brěve discussion des tendences actuelles dans ces domaines.     

Nutrition and growth in Italy, 1861-1911: What macroeconomic data hide

We investigate how nutritional status responded to economic growth in Italy during 1861-1911. By combining household-level data on food consumption with population censuses, we estimate that the incidence of undernutrition decreased by at least 15% between 1881 and 1901. Income elasticity of calories in 1901 was in the range of 0.3-0.6, varying inversely with the level income. Overall, our findings do not support the pessimists’ view, ubiquitous in the Italian literature. On the contrary, the early phase of Italian industrialization was beneficial to the bulk of the population, and even more so for the poorest among the poor.     

The crisis,the corporations and the state

Book reviewed in this article: O'Connor, J. 1973: The fiscal crisis of the state. O'Connor, J. 1974: The corporations and the state.