Dining out as cultural trade

Joel Waldfogel

Journal of Cultural Economics, 2020, vol. 44, issue 2, No 5, 309-338

Abstract: Abstract Perceptions of Anglo-American dominance in movie and music trade motivate restrictions on cultural trade. Yet, the market for another cultural good, food at restaurants, is roughly ten times larger than the markets for music and film. Using TripAdvisor data on restaurant cuisines, along with Euromonitor data on overall and fast-food expenditure, this paper calculates implicit trade patterns in global cuisines for 52 destination countries. We obtain four results. First, the pattern of cuisine trade resembles the “gravity” patterns in physically traded products. Second, after accounting gravity factors, the most popular cuisines are Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and American. Third, excluding fast food, the largest net exporters of their cuisines are the Italians and the Japanese, while the largest net importers are the USA—with a 2015 deficit of over $140 billion—followed by Brazil, China, and the UK. With fast food included, the US deficit shrinks to $55 billion but remains the largest net importer along with China and, to a lesser extent, the UK and Brazil. Fourth, cuisine trade patterns more closely resemble migration patterns than patterns of food trade or patterns arising from the extent of arable land in origin countries. Cuisine trade patterns run starkly counter to the audiovisual patterns that have motivated concern about Anglo-American cultural dominance.

Keywords: Cultural trade; Cuisine; Services trade (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10824-019-09360-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Dining Out as Cultural Trade (2019)
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:44:y:2020:i:2:d:10.1007_s10824-019-09360-5

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

DOI: 10.1007/s10824-019-09360-5

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 ().