Patrick Messerlin

It has been widely believed that subsidies can help revive film industries, but the link between the intent and the actual results deserves more careful scrutiny. This paper addresses this issue by comparing and analyzing Europe and the United States. Originally, Europe’s subsidies were developed to increase the number of film productions, but they soon became ineffective and were largely exploited by Hollywood as a way to circumvent European protectionist...

In 1989, the Member States of the European Union integrated their TV markets together in order to create a larger and more open ‘single TV market’ through the Television without Frontiers Directive. The French film industry used this opportunity to extract additional revenues by implementing TV quotas and strengthening the chronologie des m
edias. This paper examines the impact of these two measures on the French film and TV industries and shows how they were...

Sweden and Korea have a very different approach to the film industry. Having a small domestic market, the Swedish film industry tends to see its comparative advantage in deepening its long tradition of producing “art movies” competing in festivals. In short, it has faced Hollywood dominance by cultivating different types of films. The Korean film industry has been impregnated with the US film tradition, with its first afterwar generation of film-makers —...

This paper explores a much-neglected aspect of cultural policies: the role of the institutions in charge and the way they use the instruments at their disposal. It focuses on the film industry which offers the remarkable contrast on how the Korean film industry has outperformed the French one in less than twenty years. This paper provides three conclusions. First, it presents an economic analysis of the French and Korean institutions which shows that building a...