Abstract
The UNESCO World Heritage List is designed to protect the global heritage. We show that, with respect to countries and continents, the existing World Heritage List is highly imbalanced. Major econometric determinants of this imbalance are historical GDP, historical population, area in square kilometers of a country, and number of years of high civilization. Surprisingly, economic and political factors, such as membership on the UN Security Council, which should be unrelated to the value of a country’s heritage and therefore should have no impact, are shown to have a systematic impact on the composition of the World Heritage List.
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Notes
After the 36th ordinary session of the World Heritage Committee, held in Saint Petersburg on June 24, 2012–July 6, 2012. Only two Sites have been de-listed since the implementation of the List. http://whc.unesco.org/en/list, accessed on January 29, 2013.
http://www.economist.com/node/18119225?story_id=18119225, accessed on February 20, 2011.
These are Mesopotamian, Arabian, Phoenician, Persian, Egyptian, Ottoman, Jewish, Greek, Occident, Aegean, Roman, Byzantine, Indian, Chinese, Mongolian, and Japanese.
Testing Cultural and Natural Sites separately, the coefficient for Natural Sites in contrast is statistically not significant, as expected, which supports our approach to use this variable as a proxy for cultural potential.
As expected, the impact of historical GDP per capita is stronger for Cultural Sites. It has no significant impact on the number of Natural Sites.
Again, as expected, the historical size of the population has no significant effect on the number of Natural Sites.
This variable is sometimes also used as a measure for tourist specialization Arezki et al. (2009). Tourism Specialization and Economic Development: Evidence from the UNESCO World Heritage List. IMF Working Paper.
As an alternative measure, we also tested the total number of tourists: this variable has a positive and significant impact. However, if accounting for the size of the population by taking the share of tourists divided by the total population, the impact becomes statistically insignificant (not shown in Table 2).
The results are not shown here, but available from the authors.
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Acknowledgments
For helpful suggestions, we are indebted to Trine Bille, Reto Cueni, Axel Dreher, Peter Egger, Christoph Engel, Walter Santagata, Jan-Egbert Sturm, David Throsby, and James Vreeland. We thank the participants of the PEIO conference 2011 and of the ACEI conference 2011, where an earlier version was presented. Further, we are thankful to Maurizio Galli for the support provided in the data handling.
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Frey, B.S., Pamini, P. & Steiner, L. Explaining the World Heritage List: an empirical study. Int Rev Econ 60, 1–19 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12232-013-0174-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12232-013-0174-4