Teaching Cultural Economics.

Abstract

The author lays out her journey to specialization in cultural economics from her school days to the present. Along the way, she was involved in setting up the Master’s degree in Cultural Economics and Cultural Entrepreneurship at Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR), where she taught courses in cultural economics and economics creative industries for a number of years. Within cultural economics, she specializes in the economics of copyright and was involved in the development of the Society for Economic Research on Copyright Issues (SERCI). The main focus of her work has been on artists’ labour markets and the role of copyright in paying creators and performers. In her long career, Ruth Towse has taught economics on a variety of courses, always in the belief that its application, both theoretical and empirical, illuminates policy issues even in the cultural arena, which is often regarded in some sense above economics. Her work and that of other cultural economists has repeatedly shown how it does so.