Introduction

There is perhaps no other area where the relationship between economics and culture is more direct that in the arena of public policy. Not that there is much evidence of this in most of the world's economies; the concept of an explicit cultural policy as a specific government portfolio has had little or no prominence in most countries until quite recently, even though public-sector involvement in cultural activity of one sort or another in these countries goes back further, and broader interactions between culture and state go back further still.

One of the reasons for the lack of interest in culture in contemporary public policy has had to do with the ascendancy of the economic paradigm in the conduct of national and international affairs, which we discussed in chapter 1. The dominating influence of economic ways of thinking on the process of policy formation in many democratic countries has meant that public policy and economic policy have become almost synonymous.