OECD Culture and Local Development.pdf - PACA

2. LOCAL DEVELOPMENT BASED ON ATTRACTING VISITORS AND TOURISTS
attached to public services offered by the City of Naples (Santagata and
Signorello, 1998).
The city had a free service called Napoli Musei Aperti (“open-air museums”) that
consisted of showcasing the attractions of the central city’s old quarters
(Decumano, Scappanapoli, the Spanish Quarter)) once a year by fixing them up
and posting signs. The municipality wanted to replace its subsidies with a
service financed by contributions from citizens or visitors. The basis of the
method used was to ask the following: would you agree to pay to continue to
the service that is provided today, if the municipality could no longer finance
it? To avoid any interference between this question and citizens’ fears about
the quality of future management, it was specified that the service would be
placed under non-profit private management. The questionnaire contained
four types of questions relating to past visiting habits, the cost accepted to date,
willingness to pay, and budget allocation. These questions were designed to
determine whether the responses were realistic and to identify the potential
effects of substituting one type of spending for another.
It was found that some people said they were ready to pay when in fact they
had never used the service, and that others were unwilling to pay even if they
had used it. These two cases were excluded in order to achieve sound results:
48.3% of those responding to the survey (226 out of 468) refused the idea of paying,
something that could be explained by the fact that the good had previously been
offered free. By contrast, others declared their willingness to pay more than the
cost of the service. But these two effects did not cancel each other. A further result
was also interesting: low-income people were more willing to pay than wealthier
respondents, something for which several explanations can be advanced.
• The simplest is to say that cultural goods are not necessarily “superior” goods,
as too systematic an interpretation might suggest.
• The second explanation is more interesting: the cultural good represents
the values of neighbourhood or networking, and low-income people are partial
to such values 42 .
• A third explanation may be offered: low-income people live at or close to
the sites showcased by the cultural service, which makes them more
sensitive to their maintenance than others might be.
- A 1997 World Bank evaluation of the benefits of renovating the Medina of Fez
covered two aspects (Fiorentino, 1997):
• the value that visitors to the town attributed to the renovation,
CULTURE AND LOCAL DEVELOPMENT - ISBN 92-64-00990-6 - © OECD 2005 55