Bilateral Trade of Cultural Goods

Abstract

International trade flows of cultural goods have grown rapidly over the last decades and their liberalization will be an important issue of future multilateral trade negotiations. In this paper, we focus on bilateral trade in cultural goods and investigate its determinants. Furthermore, we use trade in cultural goods as a proxy for countries' cultural proximity and study if countries with proximate cultural tastes have more intense bilateral exchanges. Our estimations show a positive and significant influence of cultural flows on overall trade, suggesting that regulations fostering domestic cultural creation might have impacts going beyond what is generally expected.

Measuring the Effect of Revealed Cultural Preferences on Tourism Exports

“…That is, if two countries become culturally closer, the tourism trade between these two countries can be expected to flourish. The results are smaller for total trade, with a coefficient of 0.1, which is comparable to the results from Disdier et al (2010), who find the cultural preferences variable close to 0.2. In this study, it is concluded that the effect of cultural preferences is almost 4 times larger on international tourism exports than on total exports.…”

“…However, culture itself is an item of consumption, and the volume/value of bilateral trade in cultural products reveals consumer preferences. Disdier et al (2010) propose that the volume of trade in cultural products can be used to determine the level of cultural preferences between two trading partners.…”

“…The methodology proposed by Disdier et al (2010) is applied to construct a variable for measuring the revealed preferences for the culture of the destination by tourists from the home country. is defined as the cultural preferences for the country i by country j at time t. It is assumed that the value of trade in cultural products from country i by country j reveals the preference of the consumers in country j for the culture of country i and is a good proxy for measuring the latter.…”

“…More precisely, it is argued that the dummy variables reflect a form of cultural proximity whereas there is a need to develop a measure for the cultural preferences of the tourists. The methodology is inspired from the contribution of Disdier et al (2010), who use the value of trade of cultural goods and services as a proxy for cultural preferences in a gravity model to explain bilateral trade among 239 countries over the period [1989][1990][1991][1992][1993][1994][1995][1996][1997][1998][1999][2000][2001][2002][2003][2004][2005]. To calculate the value of trade in culture, the total value of the trade in cultural products is used.…”

The KOF Globalisation Index – revisited

“…Kluver and Fu (2004) note that transmission of cultural values is closely related to sharing cultural goods and services such as movies, TV series, music and other works of art across borders. Disdier et al (2010) use bilateral trade in cultural goods as a proxy for countries' cultural proximity. Hellmanzik and Schmitz (2015) use trade in audio-visual services based on bilateral hyperlinks and bilateral website visits as a proxy for cultural proximity.…”