Impact of Local Cultural Traits on Regional Productivity in China

Abstract

Culture is an endogenous factor for economic growth. The relationship between culture and productivity in China would be a typical case to show the distinctive trajectory of the ancient culture and rapid modern developing country with various regions. From the Neo-Weberian perspective, we select the residents work attitudes, attitudes to family, life attitudes, college/university of education, beliefs in democracy, faith in religion, and trust in government as the indicators of local cultural traits, to explore the relations between personal attitudes and regional productivity. Noting that usual statistic and econometric analysis is unreliable when considering the symbiotic relationship between culture and economic performance, no matter whether the culture is endogenous or exogenous for economic growth, identifying cultural-economic relationships with multiple values is unclear because of endogenous problems. Hence, we use the Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) method to quantify the impact of culture issues on regional development. Data of the selected personal cultural values at the provincial level are from the Online Analysis China 2010–2014 in the World Value Survey (WVS) database. The results conduct four types of pathways that local cultural traits have impact on regional productivity with various development levels distributed spatially.