Culture, environmental values and economic growth: Essays in development and ecological economics.

摘要

This work is a collection of essays designed to explore the relationship between economic development and the evolution of cultural and environmental values across countries. Its purpose is to provide preliminary empirical evidence on relatively new research areas in economics and show the importance of placing economic analysis into socio-cultural context.; The first essay investigates the influence of cultural factors on economic performance. A cross-sectional model is developed to test the relationship between measures of economic performance and cultural factors. The results show that countries characterized by secular norms, a positive attitude towards wealth accumulation and to a lesser extent a positive view of the future are most likely to experience fast economic growth. The model also demonstrates the potential occurrence of a cultural shift at higher levels of economic development: the focus on Wealth diminishes while the level of Individualism soars and the Rule of Law becomes strong.; An empirical framework is developed in the second essay to test the relationship between cultural capital and economic growth. It is shown that proxies used to represent certain aspects of cultural capital—active cultural trade and policy, dissemination of knowledge, questioning of values and cultural unification—are positively correlated with economic growth. It is concluded that in a context of globalization, investing in cultural assets could help countries promote economic development and preserve their historical and cultural continuum.; The third essay investigates the impact of economic affluence on the level of environmental concern across nations. Indicators representing environmental awareness and environmental behavior are regressed against a set of economic, demographic, psychological, political and education variables. The results show that economic affluence has, at best, a marginal direct influence on environmental awareness and no direct impact on environmental behavior. They also suggest that the degree of urbanization, the level of subjective well-being and the level of income inequality directly impact environmental awareness, while education, population pressure and happiness are significantly correlated with environmental behavior.