Measuring the Total Opportunity Costs of Cultural Expenses: An Empirical Exercise for the Spanish Economy

The present analysis uses an extended version of the restricted demand-driven Input-Output multipliers to compute the economy-wide opportunity costs of households cultural expenses. We then present a novel methodology that allows capturing the direct and indirect costs associated to movements along the Households expenditure possibilities frontier. To this end, we use a Social Accounting Matrix for the Spanish economy. Apart from computing the total opportunity costs of cultural expenses for the average Spanish Household, we have evaluated these total costs for eight different Households categories classified according to its monthly net income. In our view, the results are useful not only to understand what justifies the different consumption patterns regarding cultural expenses in a specific region, such as Spain, but also across Households categories. In addition, our findings may serve to increase the degree of efficiency of those policies that seek to increase cultural expenses in an economy because of both the total economy-wide effects and the positive indirect externalities that culture generates.