Evaluating the efficiency of museums using multiple outputs

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artistic creativity. Secondly, because they also represent a form of cultural creation in the sense that the way the organisation is run, how the museum exhibits are displayed or the extent to which its activities are disseminated may have an effect vis-à-vis the institution’s appeal, and impact its performance efficiency. Finally, and from an analytical standpoint, museums constitute a delimited cultural entity, both in terms of demand, through the stated will and preferences expressed by museum visitors and other kinds of user, as well as in terms of supply, since ownership and management of such entities may be reflected in a number of organizational and institutional formulae, which may be related, and which are increasingly varied. In sum, museums may be perceived as complex institutions merging a series of inputs, such as the work factor (staff) and capital factor (building, equipment, and museum collections), so as to achieve a series of outputs, not all of which are tangible or expressible in market terms, but which correspond rather to general activities related to exhibition, training, education, conservation, research, and so on. Hence the interest in assessing the efficiency of such institutions as a particular and specific analysis of public sector efficiency, or the supply of necessary public goods and services aimed at meeting various social requirements. Based on the above-mentioned approach, the ultimate goal of the present work is to gauge the efficiency of the Regional System of Museums in the Autonomous Community of Castilla y León (Spain), a particular type of institution that implies a certain level of organisational accreditation of the entities involved, thereby also ensuring a certain degree of uniformity therein. Specifically, our goal is to explore drivers of efficiency within this group of institutions under a variety of situations and considering multiple outputs, as well as analysing the evolution of the efficiency ranges over time. Finally, the work seeks to evidence this technique’s usefulness for establishing guidelines and recommendations concerning the use of resources in an effort to enhance the overall efficiency thereof as well as the performance of each individual institution involved. In order to undertake this task, the work is structured in four parts. After this introductory section, part two offers a review of the state of the art vis-à-vis the evaluation of cultural institutions. Section three contains the empirical analysis, describing the sample of museums used, the methodological approach, and the main findings to emerge from the research. The work concludes with the discussion and main conclusions section. 4
2.- Evaluating the efficiency of cultural institutions: state of the art Efficiency studies have been applied to the field of culture later than in other public service sectors such as health or education. The earliest applications are found in the evaluation of the performing arts (Gapinsky, 1980) and symphony orchestras (Lange et al., 1985), focusing on an appraisal of the production technology of these activities by estimating production functions and cost functions. The first study conducted into the domain of cultural heritage involved adopting this technique to the case of a broad sample of North-American museums (Jackson, 1988), and has since only been followed up in the work of Bishop and Brand (2003) to measure the efficiency of a selection of museums in the United Kingdom. By estimating an extremely simple production function, the work found that the greater the level of public funding and the greater the involvement of volunteers in museum tasks, the lower the efficiency measured in terms of the number of visitors. No further analysis has been carried out along this line of research, probably due to the intrinsic constraints of the model itself, which requires synthesising in a single output the large number of goals and tasks inherent in such institutions 5 . A greater number of efficiency studies have been conducted based on non-parametric mathematical programming techniques, particularly DEA and derivatives thereof. Based on the flexibility which, as pointed out, this technique affords, there have been numerous applications since the 1990s, above all in the field of museums. Studies of a similar nature have also emerged for orchestras (Luksetich and Nold Hughes, 1997), libraries (Vitaliano, 1998), and theatres (Taalas, 1997 and Marco Serrano, 2006). Focusing on the field of museums, Paulus (1995) explores the technical efficiency of French museums, while Mairesse (1997) and Mairesse, and Vanden Eeckaut (2002) evaluated samples of Belgian museums. The work by Taalas (1998) is one of the few approaches to evaluating allocative efficiency, and offers an application to a particular type of Finnish museum. In Italy, Pignataro (2002) explored efficiency and technical change in museums in Sicily. Basso and Funari, (2004) offer a detailed appraisal of productivity gains for a sample of museums located in three large tourist cities (Bologna, Florence and Venice). Finally, Del Barrio, et al. (2009) evaluate the efficiency 5 This is not the case for theatres, for which fresh studies, such as those of Fazioli and Filippini (1997), Zieba (2011) and Last and Wetzd (2010) have emerged along this line. 5
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