Econ Papers Daily / 期刊论文
诗词与远方：唐宋文学如何塑造中国现代旅游经济
Poetry and distant places: How tang and song literature shapes China's modern tourism economy
摘要
This paper provides causal evidence on how intangible cultural capital creates modern economic value through tourism. We focus on China's Tang and Song (T&S) literature (618–1279 CE), which is widely regarded as the pinnacle of Chinese classical culture and a key part of the national literary canon, and use newly compiled data on the spatial distribution of T&S literary works linked to city-level tourism outcomes from 2002 to 2019. By instrumenting local literary richness with the historical presence of famous academies and the number of pre-Tang poets, we estimate an elasticity of about 0.2 between T&S literary works and domestic tourism outcomes, indicating a substantial positive contribution of T&S literature to China's modern tourism economy. We further document that this effect is mainly driven by a demand-side force: T&S works included in the Chinese language textbooks create widely shared cultural references that increase destination salience and boost tourism demand for their cities of origin. Moreover, two complementary supply-side channels support this effect: cities with higher T&S literary output later accumulated more cultural resources and developed a richer array of tourism products. These results highlight that intangible literary canons, once standardized and disseminated through formal education, serve as a scalable demand-side asset that generates lasting, place-specific tourism benefits even more than a thousand years after their creation.
中文摘要
本文提供了关于无形文化资本如何通过旅游创造现代经济价值的因果证据。我们聚焦于中国唐宋文学（公元618—1279年），其被广泛视为中国古典文化的巅峰和民族文学经典的关键组成部分，并使用新编制的唐宋文学作品空间分布数据，将其与2002—2019年城市层面的旅游结果相联系。通过以著名书院的历史存在和唐以前诗人数量作为地方文学丰富度的工具变量，我们估计唐宋文学作品与国内旅游结果之间的弹性约为0.2，表明唐宋文学对中国现代旅游经济具有显著的正向贡献。我们进一步记录，这一效应主要由需求侧力量驱动：被收入语文教材的唐宋作品创造了广泛共享的文化参照，提升了目的地显著性，并增加了对其原属城市的旅游需求。此外，两个互补的供给侧渠道支撑了这一效应：唐宋文学产出更高的城市后来积累了更多文化资源，并开发出更丰富的旅游产品。这些结果表明，无形的文学经典一旦通过正规教育被标准化和传播，便成为一种可扩展的需求侧资产，即使在其创作一千多年后，仍能产生持久的、特定于地方的旅游收益。