Abstract
Despite consensus in the literature regarding the importance of culture and arts, as well as their vulnerability to economic shocks, few empirical studies assess the degree to which they have been affected adversely by the COVID-19 pandemic. This study thus quantitatively measures the impact of COVID-19 on people’s cultural engagement in South Korea. Various econometric methods are applied to South Korea’s large-scale Culture and Arts Activity Survey dataset, which is nationally representative and provides micro-level detail. Results suggest that COVID-19 made South Korean people substantially and significantly less likely to participate in cultural and arts activities—by 15 to 17 percentage points for venue activities and 24 to 25 percentage points for outdoor activities. Strong heterogeneity, however, seems to exist depending on an individual’s gender, age, education, income, and early exposure to the arts. Interestingly, the pandemic rather raised people’s likelihood of visiting a library, which serves as a safer cultural outlet, and the number of movies watched through digital media increased. Remarkably, the results from quantile count regression suggest that frequent goers were more affected. However, there is preliminary evidence indicating an exception for ‘very frequent goers’ (highly engaged individuals at the 90th percentile level from the bottom) who may not have much compromised their consumption of culture and arts despite the challenging circumstances brought on by the pandemic.
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The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author on request.
Notes
This information was obtained from the COVID-19 Dashboard provided by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, retrieved from https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html on 2022-July-31.
‘Korean wave’ refers to the widespread popularity of South Korean culture, such as K-pop music and K-dramas (Haugland, 2020).
The Federation of Artistic & Cultural Organizations of Korea reports that 1614 cultural events worth 26.6 billion KRW (approx. USD 21 million) were canceled or postponed between January and April 2020 (Na, 2020).
This is because culture and arts involve various components such as imagination, sensory activation, cognitive stimulation, and social interaction that can prompt psychological, physiological, social, and behavioral responses associated with the management of mental health and personal well-being (Wheatley & Bickerton, 2017; Fancourt & Finn, 2019; Mak et al., 2021).
In 2019, its official title was changed from ‘Survey on Cultural Enjoyment’ to the current one.
Excluding school libraries.
Note the smaller number of observations for these two variables in Table 1.
Such information is time- and region-varying.
The number of historical sites open to the public in South Korea remained stable throughout the investigation period. To better control for supply-side factors, it is ideal to consider not only the availability and abundance of cultural infrastructures but also their operational intensity (e.g., the number of working days and hours). However, this information is unavailable due to data limitations.
To obtain an overview of zero-inflation for each outcome variable, see Tables 14 and 15 in Online Appendix C, where the proportions of zeros and nonzeros are compared.
Equidispersion is a property of the Poisson distribution where the variance of the distribution is equal to the mean.
For further details on the role of exclusion restriction variables in the sample selection context, see Shin (2022b).
Figure 1 depicts the cultural and arts attendance rate, which refers to the proportion of people who have attended cultural and arts events (such as music, theater, dance, movies, museums, and art galleries) at least once in a certain year.
In some specifications, region-year fixed effects completely control for \(\textbf{z}_{r,t}\).
When \(t\ge 2020\), everyone gets the treatment, without exception.
That is, other changes (i.e., confounders) are unlikely to occur between the before and after period (Lee, 2005).
A large, nationwide outbreak occurred during August 2020, and the 2020 cross section was collected between September and November of 2020.
When assessing long-term trends, \(\beta _{t,q}\) is also informative.
Each of the thirteen different outcomes is analyzed separately in later sections as well.
This is because, strictly speaking, even when aiming to correctly model \(\Pr \left( \sum _{k=1}^{K}y_{i}^{(k)}>0\right)\), which involves a one-dimensional aggregated count outcome, one must work with the joint distribution of each \(y_{i}^{(k)}\). As a simple example,
$$\begin{aligned} \Pr \left( \sum _{k=1}^{K}y_{i}^{(k)}>0\right) =1-\Pr \left( \bigcap _{k=1}^{K}(y_{i}^{(k)}=0)\right) \end{aligned}$$holds. Notice that on the right-hand side, one is considering the probability that all of the variables \(y_{i}^{(1)},\ldots ,y_{i}^{(K)}\) are equal to zero, which requires knowledge of both the marginal distributions and the joint distribution.
For both types of activities, the pre-pandemic average participation rates were approximately 74%.
For details, see Table 16 in Online Appendix.
School libraries are excluded.
A log-likelihood test rejects the null hypothesis of equidispersion.
Following the surge of COVID-19 cases, the decline in movie theater attendance in South Korea coincided with the increasing popularity of streaming-based content subscription services (Yoon, 2020). For example, Netflix observed a notable increase in the number of subscribers to their over-the-top (OTT) services. In terms of monthly payments, Netflix in South Korea recorded 16.7 billion KRW in March 2019, 18.5 billion KRW in April 2019, 36.2 billion KRW in March 2020, and 43.9 billion KRW in April 2020 (Yoon, 2020). This indicates a growth rate of approximately 2.2 to 2.4 times.
This represents a critical limitation because \(\gamma\) in (8) might capture preexisting time trends per se, not the exact impact derived from COVID-19.
Zero-inflation is not an issue for this outcome variable because only a small fraction of observations have zero values.
Those with at least a college degree are 1.5 to 3 times more likely to engage in arts activities (Mak et al., 2021).
The 95% confidence intervals are estimated using the bootstrap method with 1000 resamples.
The statistical insignificance at \(q=0.9\) is not uncommon in quantile regression estimates because the tails of a distribution contain relatively fewer observations. Another reason for the lower efficiency of quantile regression estimates at the tails is that the quantile regression model assumes a linear relationship between predictors and an outcome variable, which may not hold in the tails of the distribution where the relationship can be more complex and nonlinear.
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Acknowledgements
I extend my sincere gratitude to Jin-Young Choi (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies), Hyeongjong Kim, Sang-Kon Park (Korea Culture and Tourism Institute), and Jinseong Park (KDI School of Public Policy and Management) for their invaluable comments on earlier drafts of this research. Furthermore, I would like to thank the editor, Douglas Noonan, and the two anonymous referees at the Journal of Cultural Economics for their insightful feedback.
Funding
(i) This work was supported by the Ajou University research fund. (ii) This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2020S1A3A2A02104190). (iii) Korea Labor Institute, National Research Council, Republic of Korea.
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Shin, S. The impact of COVID-19 on cultural and arts activities: evidence from a large-scale micro-level survey in South Korea. J Cult Econ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-024-09501-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-024-09501-5