The first study of the economic impact of the Fallas festival in the Valencian Community will start in January 2023, with the sending of the first surveys to the Fallas commissions. It is the idea that the Chair of the Sustainable Economic Model of Valencia and surroundings (MESVAL) of the University of Valencia works on, to whom the Valencia City Council has commissioned what will be the first detailed study of the festival.
The questionnaires can be processed online, through email or WhatsApp, and they will be invited to answer all the commissions registered in the Fallera Central Board, since the scope of the same will be the city of Valencia, despite the fact that the party is also celebrated in other localities of the territory.
The "commitment" of the Chair is that the data be known by the end of 2023, confirms its director, the economist José Manuel Pastor, also an IVIE researcher. He explains that this will be the first work that "goes beyond spending", alluding to the first known study on this matter, which dates back to 2008.
The figure that that report left was 753 million euros and it is the one that is usually used to refer to the party, but it is presumed already out of date, all sources confirm, since the year 2022 has nothing to do with 2008. Neither the Valencian society nor the Fallas party is the same anymore.
It was prepared by the Intergrouping of Fallas, but Pastor argues that this is an "expenditure" study that does not contemplate the economic multiplication that the fact that the Fallas are celebrated entails. "That first study is laudable, but it needed to add the cost of tourists, in addition to taking into account everything that the fact of celebrating the Fallas generates in the economy," he argues.
Already in the epilogue of that first report, the authors Jesús Català and Gil-Manuel Hernández, members of the Association of Fallas Studies, warned that future studies would be necessary that, "in a systematic, comparative and continuous way, can offer new data and new elements to properly evaluate the complexity of the Fallas world as a whole and the relevance it has for our city”.
Thus, starting next January, researchers from the MESVAL Chair will study four elements. The first, to the falleros and falleras: what do they spend on restaurants, hairdressing, dressings, clothing, even men. Here, Pastor explains, the fees they pay as members of the commissions will not be detailed, since that will enter another chapter, that of the party's budget. "We are going to survey Falleros and try to access all the Fallas to see the heterogeneity of the Fallas, it is not enough for me to interview only three from the Special section," details the economist.
The second element is the expense of the Fallas commissions, since this is where they must explain their budgets. Pastor explains that in the fallas there is a certain submerged economy since, as it is not a for-profit activity, there are certain payments that are not declared, for which he presumes this will be the "most delicate" epigraph.
The third element to study is tourism, key in a city like Valencia, which has especially stood out in recent years. The idea of the Chair is that street surveys be carried out during the next holidays, which will allow estimating the average cost and in which sector it is spent.
The influx of tourists will be computed with the data contrasted by mobile telephony that will differentiate between tourist and excursionist, who is the resident of the neighboring town who travels to the city to participate in the party but does not spend the night.
Lastly, the study will consider public spending, which is done by the institutions in the Valencian Community as a whole. The City Council, Provincial Council and Generalitat Valenciana will be invited to participate in the economic report of the festival.
