Dining out as cultural trade
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Dining out as cultural trade Joel Waldfogel1 Received: 13 February 2019 / Accepted: 27 July 2019 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract Perceptions of Anglo-American dominance in movie and music trade motivate restrictions on cultural trade. Yet, the market for another cultural good, food at restaurants, is roughly ten times larger than the markets for music and film. Using TripAdvisor data on restaurant cuisines, along with Euromonitor data on overall and fast-food expenditure, this paper calculates implicit trade patterns in global cuisines for 52 destination countries. We obtain four results. First, the pattern of cuisine trade resembles the “gravity” patterns in physically traded products. Second, after accounting gravity factors, the most popular cuisines are Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and American. Third, excluding fast food, the largest net exporters of their cuisines are the Italians and the Japanese, while the largest net importers are the USA—with a 2015 deficit of over $140 billion—followed by Brazil, China, and the UK. With fast food included, the US deficit shrinks to $55 billion but remains the largest net importer along with China and, to a lesser extent, the UK and Brazil. Fourth, cuisine trade patterns more closely resemble migration patterns than patterns of food trade or patterns arising from the extent of arable land in origin countries. Cuisine trade patterns run starkly counter to the audiovisual patterns that have motivated concern about Anglo-American cultural dominance. Keywords Cultural trade · Cuisine · Services trade
1 Introduction Despite a trend toward acceptance of free trade in goods and services, many countries restrict trade in cultural products, largely as a reaction to US dominance in audiovisual products. Concerns about US dominance in motion pictures are not unfounded. The US producers’ share of box office revenue exceeds the domestic share in most countries, and US movies’ box office revenue abroad (“exports”)
* Joel Waldfogel [email protected] 1
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Journal of Cultural Economics
exceeded US revenue for foreign films (“imports”) by over $10 billion in 2014.1 As a result, most European countries subsidize local motion picture production, and a number of countries, including France and Canada, impose domestic content restrictions on radio broadcasting.2 Over the objections of US negotiators, the French introduced the “cultural exception” into the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations in the 1990s, excluding cultural goods from the agreement. French President François Mitterrand argued that “no country should be allowed to control the images of the whole world.”3 While discussions of cultural trade tend to focus on audiovisual products, these products do not exhaust the list of cultural products.4 Perhaps the most ubiquitous— and most economically important—cultural product is prepared food at restaurants. By sheer size, the market for prepared food dwarfs market
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