The World Heritage list: Which sites promote the brand? A big data spatial econometrics approach

David Wuepper and Marc Patry
Additional contact information
Marc Patry: UNESCO, Office in Nairobi

Journal of Cultural Economics, 2017, vol. 41, issue 1, No 1, 21 pages

Abstract: Abstract UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention encourages inscribed sites to promote the World Heritage brand by clearly communicating their affiliation. Based on the feedback from over 319,000 visitors at 791 locations, we create an index that shows the extent to which World Heritage sites are actually branding themselves as such. We find great heterogeneity throughout the list and explain this econometrically with site-specific incentives. Notably, the sites that benefit more from the World Heritage brand are significantly more willing to contribute to the collective brand than sites that benefit less. Specifically, rural sites are much better branded than urban sites, as rural sites benefit more from the brand than urban sites. We also find a positive relationship between World Heritage branding and its conservation status and a U-shaped relationship between a site’s visitor numbers and its branding. Furthermore, Asian sites are much better branded than sites in the Middle East, and richer countries and those with already more international tourists are branded less. The difficulty of effective branding, e.g., for large, open-access sites, has no significant effect. Our findings suggest that mandatory World Heritage branding obligations would have a positive effect on the World Heritage brand equity, bringing conservation and economic benefits to a much wider range of World Heritage sites.

Keywords: UNESCO World Heritage; Collective brand; Cultural tourism; Heritage conservation; Brand equity; Spatial econometrics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C55 C8 H4 L2 L3 Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10824-016-9266-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jculte:v:41:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1007_s10824-016-9266-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10824/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10824-016-9266-9

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Cultural Economics is currently edited by Federico Etro and Douglas Noonan

More articles in Journal of Cultural Economics from Springer, The Association for Cultural Economics International Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().