International Trade and the Protection of Local Cultural Production - A Survey of Empirical Studies

Abstract

This paper surveys recent empirical studies examining various fields of cultural production in order to scrutinize to what extent they can inform drafting new policies in the field of liberalizing the trade in cultural goods and services. The analysis focuses on three main groups of empirical studies. The first one is composed of studies examining the impacts of concentration of music industry and production on the diversity of prerecorded music media available on the market. The empirical studies in the second group attempt to identify the factors affecting the success of domestic movie production on the domestic market as well as in the international trade with movies. They show that the factors such as the domestic market size, the level of domestic cinema attendance, the cultural distance between two national markets and the use of same language considerably affect the export and import of movies. The last group of empirical studies enquires into the efficiency of screen quotas and subsidies to protect and promote domestic cultural production. The paper concludes that it is essential to strike an appropriate and adequate balance between fully liberalizing the trade in particular cultural goods and services on the one side and state interventions, such as screen quotas, taxes, subsides or other types of redistributive mechanisms and schemes, on the other, in order to design an efficient policy for liberalizing the trade in cultural goods and services while protecting and promoting cultural diversity on the local, regional and international level.