Cultural Corridors: An Analysis of Persistence in Impacts on Local Development — A Neo-Weberian Perspective on South-East Europe

Abstract

Culture matters for economic development. This postulate has been a main conceptual concern for the "old" institutional economics (OIE) and has lately also been tested through neoclassicalinspired econometric techniques. This conceptual foundation has been confirmed in several quantitative studies on developed countries, in particular cases from the USA, Germany, and Italy. In less developed regions with a wealth of cultural heritage, in particular SouthEast Europe, this postulate is still an underexplored issue from the perspective of advanced econometric approaches. The aim of the present paper is to examine the impact of what are called SouthEastern European cultural corridors on welfare-and especially on total employment-at the local or regional level. Accounting for gross value added and sectoral specialisation, the effect of such corridors is examined by considering the distance to a cultural corridor: namely, the East Trans-Balkan Road (crossing Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece) as an explanatory factor for regional development-in particular, employment. Using the European University Institute (EUI) European Regional Dataset (ERD), as well as the geo-data from the Cultural Corridors of the SouthEast Europe website, we estimate a regression model using a 2SLS instrumental variable (IV) approach, with a pooled data set at the NUTS 3 level (Eurostat) during the period 1980 to 2011. Next, we triangulate our results by using the distance to the cultural corridor concerned as a treatment effect in a propensity-score-matching and difference-indifferences exploratory analysis. Our findings confirm the importance of distance to the cultural corridor under investigation as a strong predictor for local socioeconomic development. Moreover, our results suggest that the slow evolution of culture over time is likely to lead to the gradual emergence of new geographical cultural centres and a new cultural path dependence built-up of persistence chains.

Value-Free Analysis of Values: A Culture-Based Development Approach

“…NIE promoted the quantitative study of institutions and culture [20]. Studies building on this literature have empirically demonstrated that there is persistence and path-dependence in the process of impact by cultural institutions on socio-economic development [21]. Working on a very similar vein, one of the fathers of modern Political Economy, Alesina and Perotti [22], demonstrate how empirical neoclassical models can accommodate for the study of the impact by political and voting behavior on the economic process.…”

Research on Tibetan Folk’s Contemporary Tibetan Cultural Adaptive Differences and Its Influencing Factors—Taking ShigatseCity, Tibet, China as an Example

“…Especially since the reform and opening up, Tibet's development, stability, and opening up have enabled foreign culture, modern culture, and post-modern culture to infiltrate all aspects of Tibetan people's work and life, and promoted the slow evolution of Tibetan traditional local culture, leading to the gradual emergence of new local cultures. In this context, the Tibetan people have a new sense of place and reinvented the topophilia [85], which is newborn to the local culture, and constructed a new cultural path-dependence and cultural adaptable persistence chains [86]; this was a comprehensive process of reshaping local cultural characteristics and strengthening contemporary local identity.…”

“…Tibetan people's cultural adaptive differences are explained by the seven dimensions of traditional cultural observance, modern cultural influence, using technology, policies, globalization, religious beliefs, and stable and open development in society. There is possible closed relatedness between the influencing factors of these seven dimensions reflected in the cultural adaptive differences and social cultural adaptation, psychological adaptation, interpersonal relationship adaptation, cultural values, social capital, Tibetan Buddhism, socio-economic development, modern network technology, as well as policy implementation [38,53,86]. The results of our empirical research show that "CT" and "IM" have direct effects on the Tibetans' cultural adaptable differences; "NP associated with SO", "SO combined with IM", and "UI linked with IM" have mediating effects on the Tibetan people's cultural adaptive differences.…”

Caracterización de las tipologías de representación a través de la Etnografía virtual. Los caminos Purépecha en la región lacustre de Pátzcuaro como corredor patrimonial

“…La cultura que se asocia a un periodo pasado es un factor exógeno para el desarrollo socioeconómico que se ha generado en torno a estas infraestructuras. Históricamente, los caminos han estado asociados con el transporte y las actividades socioculturales, resultando en muchos casos la construcción de imágenes simbólicas asociadas a la cultura popular y a la consolidación de imaginarios sociales (Payne & Hurt, 2015;Tubadji & Nijkamp, 2018).…”