ECONOMICS UNIQUENESS

ECONOMIC VALUATION OF CULTURAL HERITAGE ■ 81
It was a widely held belief that a systematic application of rigorous economic
thinking in evaluating and selecting public projects or plans would be a valuable
tool for improving the performance of the public sector (Little and Mirrlees 1974;
Renard 1986; Warr 1982).
However, a compound valuation of public capital goods—such as historic
city cores, monuments, landmarks, palaces, parks, and landscapes—is far from
easy and cannot be undertaken by the exclusive consideration of the tourist and
recreation sector (Kalman 1980; Lichfi eld 1989). Especially in the Anglo-Saxon
literature, the expenditures made in visiting recreational destinations are oft en
used as a proxy value for assessing the fi nancial or economic meaning of natural
parks, palaces, and museums. Th e complicating problem here is that in
geographic terms such recreational commodities and the various users are
distributed unequally over space. Th is means that recreational expenditure are
codetermined by distance frictions, so that the valuation of recreation opportunities
is prominently determined by the transportation costs inherent in
recreational and tourist visits. Consequently, the socioeconomic value of recreational
opportunities is a function of their indigenous attractiveness and of
their location in geographic space. However, the historic-cultural value of monuments
may be invariant with respect to geographical location—apart from the
scale economy emanating from a “socio-cultural complex”—so that we are still
left with the problem of a compound evaluation.
It seems to make sense to adhere to the basic economic principle that the value of
a good is dependent on the user perspective or orientation for that particular good.
Th erefore, in agreement with conventional multi-attribute utility theory, the value
of a good—including a good in the realm of cultural heritage—depends on the
functions off ered to and the use of it made by the bidder, or by society at large in the
case of public goods. Hence, in the next section a functional perspective that may
form a systematic foundation for evaluating urban cultural heritage is presented.
A Functional Perspective on the Value
of Cultural Heritage
Th e economic valuation of cultural heritage diff ers from the intrinsic meaning of
a cultural asset but aims to assess the meaning of a cultural asset for society. Th us,
the question is whether one can identify and estimate implications of the presence
of or the use of cultural heritage for the broader local or regional economic
system. Such implications may translate themselves into a multiplicity of eff ects,
such as impacts on:
• Local production system (investments, consumption, and demand for
products);
• Regional labor market (including new jobs and labor force participation);