Cultural Tourism and Sustainable Local Development

Abstract

The evaluation of cultural assets is a research activity that finds its roots in environmental evaluation. The latter aims to assess from an individual or societal perspective the economic meaning of environmental goods (or a degradation of such goods). Cultural heritage forms a particular subset of environmental goods with specific characteristics in terms of uniqueness and historical orientation. Nevertheless, various general principles from environmental valuation apply also to cultural goods, as they have similar attributes: scarcity, non-priced nature as a result of externalities, and site specificity (see, for example, Carruthers and Mundy 2006). The principles of environmental evaluation can be found in the theory of hedonic prices and implicit markets advocated decades ago by Rosen (1974). Ever since then, a great effort has been made to operationalise evaluation concepts and to extend the domain of valuation by developing adjusted new methods (for example, travel costs methods, and survey-based methods such as contingent valuation and conjoint methods). After significant progress in disciplines such as ecological economics and environmental economics (see, for example, van den Bergh et al. 2006), the question arises whether the evaluation of cultural heritage has a sufficiently strong basis.

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