Cultural Consumption and Regional Economic Development in China

Abstract

Along with the increasing of the economic development, the cultural industry plays an important role in the regional economic development. Many previous researches point out the impact of the cultural industry to the regional economic development. Most of the research consider the supply side, mainly think over the added value or employee of the cultural industry. Although the supply side research have certain meaning, but we think that the impact of the cultural industry to the regional economic development need to consider the demand side. The value of goods and services of the cultural industry have some characteristics, it is composed of the effective value and the intrinsic value. Along with the increasement of the demand, the effective value also is increased. And then we consider the demand side as the cultural consumption. Cultural consumption not only pushes the development of cultural industry but also the growth of regional economy. Based on the panel data of 31 regions in China from 2002 to 2015, this paper mainly analyzes the influence of cultural consumption on the regional economic development by combining the basic form of production function model with the panel model of influences factors. The result shows that there is a positive correlation between cultural consumption and regional economic development, means that the increasing of cultural consumption can promotes the regional economic development. From the four regions results, the eastern region, the middle region and the western region all have positive significance, compare with the coefficient, the western region is the most influential region. And this paper also finds that there are significance the relation between the regional economic development level and the cultural consumption.