罗浩

Culture and Economic Growth: A Preliminary Framework

Luo Hao

Abstract：Traditional economic theories have interpreted inter-regional disparity in long-term economic growth performance from such three levels as productive factors, technology and institution, but, the deeper factor of culture has been neglected. This article firstly defines the meaning of culture in economics, so as to make it different from its general conception. For revealing the indirect effect of culture on the economic growth performance, the author investigates its influence on factor input, technology progress and institution change. The paper then advances a new analytic framework, which can link cultural endowment with economic growth, by quoting the conditional convergence model in the theory of economic growth. In the last, the article gives some typical cases for supporting the theoretical analyses above, with a comparison of economic performance between the Confucian region and the Protestant region in nineteen century and late twenty century.

Key words：cultural endowment；economic growth；factors, technology and institution；conditional convergence