The Quality of Regional Institutional Context and Museum Service Provision: Evidence from Italy

Abstract

This study evaluates whether and how the services provided by Italian museums are influenced by the quality of the institutional context at the regional level. Institutional quality is measured by a range of indicators largely employed in the literature, such as the Institutional Quality Index (IQI), the European Quality of Government Index (EQI), and their components. Resorting to spatial autoregressive models, the presence of spatial dependence in museum service provision is also investigated. The analysis shows that the common institutional context is significant, especially for public museums, and it explains part of the spatial correlation among museums within regions.