Cultural and event tourism: an interpretative key for impact assessment

In recent years, the theme of the evaluation of impacts for tourism and cultural sectors entered on the agenda of public authorities, policy makers and managers of institutions themselves, for two main reasons: a phase of contraction of public and private resources to cultural activities; the explosion of the number of ‘events’, causing relatively quickly radical and lasting changes in the territories and in the host populations. The impact assessment has progressively become a key element for the screening of projects/events to be funded and for monitoring the effectiveness of initiatives. In the academic field, this was accompanied by the flowering of a vast literature on the topic of impacts. This paper analyses the evaluation of the impact of events related to tourism and cultural sectors, focusing on the economic impact, with the aim of underlining several important critical issues affecting the impact measurement. The paper proposes a critical analysis of the literature on the subject and an overview of the main approaches developed to measure such phenomena. Besides, there is a section devoted to the analysis of these phenomena referring to Italy.