The thirteenth edition of the Festival of Economics concluded today with a presentation by the Nobel laureate Michael Spence. There are many statistics demonstrating the success of the festival, first of all the high level of participation in terms of both speakers and the public, a public that constantly filled the 17 Festival venues.
The first figure highlighting the success of the Festival is precisely the large number of speakers: 218 experts spoke at the 104 events, meetings and conferences taking place during the course of the Festival. The events were hosted by 25 venues scattered around the city, not just in theatres and halls in Trento, but also in 6 squares, where stands and pavilions housing the live broadcasts, the 6 radio stations present and various other events were set up. Likewise, from the technological point of view the Festival did not fall short of the expectations. It was a high tech Festival, with 9 locations connected by high-speed fibre broadband, 3 maxi screens, connections for 6 radio stations, WiFi coverage for 4 squares, around 1 terabyte of traffic transferred by control rooms to the data centre through the fibre optic network, 8 control rooms used and 46 hours of live satellite broadcasts.
The Festival has also taken on an increasingly important role in terms of social media networks. The official Facebook page for the Festival - Festival Economia Trento – saw a high level of engagement: there were indeed over 43,000 views of posts, photos and videos recounting the most significant moments during the Festival to the Internet community (Facebook insights data), while there were 248,000 Twitter views.
20 people in the administrative team worked together to run the Festival, together with 10 interpreters, 25 audio technicians, 36 camera operators and 40 people responsible for setting up equipment in the squares.
120 secondary schools participated in the EconoMia competition, representing all the Italian regions. 20 students were awarded prizes, of whom 7 from Lombardy, 4 from Friuli, 3 from Veneto, 2 from Puglia, 1 from Trentino, 1 from Liguria, 1 from Piedmont and 1 from Campania. 50 students in alternating school-work programmes provided support for the administration team over the 4 days of the Festival. 110 retail and catering businesses in the city requested material about the Festival for shop windows, restaurants and bars.
