Una aproximación al análisis de eficiencia económica de los museos de Cataluña

In the current context, budget cuts result of the economic crisis held at all levels emphasize the need to evaluate the efficiency in the management of different cultural and heritage institutions. It seems important therefore to study the determinants of technical efficiency of these institutions, ie the capacity of institutions to obtain the maximum amount of product from a specific production factors in a context of multiple products and production factors. The literature on efficiency analysis is already well developed, either by the DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) (Fried, Lovell and Schmidt, 2008) or stochastic frontier methods (Aigner, Lovell and Schmidt, 1977). For example, in the case of museums, these methodologies provide a relative measure of efficiency from the factors of production (exhibition area, number of employees, etc.) and outputs (number of visitors or publications, example). In the case of cultural and heritage institutions, however, research is scarce (Bishop and Brand, 2003; Last and Wetzel, 2010; Taalas, 1997), especially in regard to our country (Del Barrio, Smith and Sanz, 2009). In this context, cultural managers (public and private) often do not have all the relevant elements for the proper management of cultural institutions. The analysis of technical efficiency of cultural institutions in Catalonia must be enabled to provide data currently exist but are relevant to the management of these institutions.