Culture and region revisited

People in different regions of the world live under different cultural and religious orders and derive various practical ethics from them. Some of these moral and religious principles are clearly more favorable for economic development than others. Yet such ethnological differences are regrettably absent from our prevailing theories of regional economic development. In this paper, culture is defined as a system of relatively slow processes of change — known as cultural arenas. A complex interface exists between these slower processes and the relatively faster ones (known as games). In attempting to assess the development prospects of any region, a key point to grasp is that this cultural interface may be self-organizing. Its future trajectory will therefore be uncertain. To the extent that the proposed system of slow processes may be construed as a region's cultural base, they may control the nature and achievable pace of that region's development.An earlier version of this paper was presented at a Conference onThe Economics of the Cities of Art, held in Venice from 13–15 May 1991.