Abstract
The World Heritage List compiles built and natural sites and more recently also intangible traditions and customs judged to be of “outstanding value to humanity” by a commission of UNESCO. The main goals are to draw attention to sites and traditions in danger of disappearing and to assist in preserving them. There are some negative effects: questionable selection; undue political intervention; overextension; and attracting destruction in conflicts. There are alternatives to the UNESCO List. Sometimes no intervention is needed, in some cases market forces can be employed, and several other evaluations are available about what is worth preserving.
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Related Literature
This chapter partly relies on
Frey BS (1997) The evaluation of cultural heritage. Some critical issues. In: Hutter H, Rizzo I (eds) Economic perspectives on cultural heritage. Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp 31–49
Frey BS, Pamini P (2010) World heritage: where are we? An empirical analysis. CESifo Working Paper No. 2919. Ifo Institute, Munich
Frey BS, Steiner L (2012) Pay as you go: a new proposal for museum pricing. Museum Manage Curatorship 27(2):223–235
The World Heritage List is presented in
UNESCO (2017) Operational guidelines for the implementation of the world heritage convention: https://whc.unesco.org/en/guidelines/
Important contributions from the economic point of view include
Benhamou F (1996) Is increased public spending for the preservation of historic monuments inevitable? The French case. J Cultural Econ 20(2):115– 131
Greffe X (1999) La gestion du patrimoine culturel. Anthropos, Paris
The relationship between heritage sites and terrorist attacks is analysed in
Frey BS, Rohner D (2007) Protecting cultural monuments against terrorism. Defence Peace Econ 18(3):245–252
An alternative list of valuable heritage sites is, for example, provided in
Schultze P (2003) 1000 places to see before you die: A traveller’s life list. Workman Publishing, New York
Random procedures for selection are discussed in
Zeitoun H, Osterloh M, Frey BS (2014) Learning from ancient Athens: demarchy and corporate governance. Acad Manage Perspect 28(1):1–14
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Frey, B.S. (2019). UNESCO World Heritage List. In: Economics of Art and Culture. SpringerBriefs in Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15748-7_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15748-7_13
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