11. Culture and the City: An Application of Data Envelopment Analysis to Cultural Performance

This paper seeks to analyse the significance of cultural amenities in a city for its socio-economic performance. In particular, our study aims to provide an evidence-based answer to the question which cities are the most efficient in terms of their multidimensional economy-culture ratio, and why. This analysis is pursued by using a large database on 40 global cities extracted from the Global Power City Index (GPCI) data system. The methodology adopted here originates from Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) complemented with a so-called Super-Efficiency Module (SEM) so as to arrive at unambiguous rankings of the cities at hand on a global cultural ladder. The DEA results are complemented with a multivariate analysis and regression models. By analysing the cultural productivity of these cities, it appears that our empirical results differ often from the usual urban ranking methods where cities such as London, New York, Paris, or Tokyo rank the highest. Large Asian cities appear to be able to obtain a good efficiency performance in terms of the ratio of (multidimensional) economic outcomes versus (multidimensional) cultural input resources.