The demand for creative arts in regional Victoria, Australia

Abstract

A healthy creative arts industry can contribute significantly to the economic and social fabric of a community. Unfortunately, regional areas often suffer from a lack of supply and demand for the creative arts. This article explores the demand for the creative arts in three regional locations in Victoria, Australia, using three broad dimensions of demand: attitudes towards the arts; frequency of participation in the arts and level of expenditure on the arts. The analysis of demand patterns uses the general modelling approach of Lévy-Garboua and Montmarquette (1996) as a basis and makes use of the ordered probit class of models for its statistical analysis. The study confirms that individual levels of demand are contingent on a range of demographic characteristics and also identifies factors such as festival attendance and increased past creative arts expenditure as being important determinants of demand for the arts.

Acknowledgements

The research in this project was funded by ARC Linkage Grant LP0453477 Demand and Supply of Creative Arts in Rural and Regional Victoria. The project also received financial support from Arts Victoria. We wish to thank Judy Morton for her ongoing support of this research project. We also wish to thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on a previous version of this article.

Notes

¹ While clearly a mail-out survey creates challenges in terms of both time and financial cost, an online survey may not have reached a representative sample of the target populations, based on the fact that ABS data suggests that only 57% of Victorian households had home Internet access in 2004–2005, and only 51% in ex-metropolitan areas of Australia (ABS, 2005).