Suchergebnisse

We develop a model of cultural transmission where television plays a role in socialisation. We study the coverage of different cultural traits by a profit-maximising TV industry and the resulting cultural dynamics. A monopolist covers both traits, but grants more coverage to the most profitable group. In a competitive TV industry each channel specialises on one trait. This might lead to cultural extinction, but only for sufficiently large majorities. Cultural extinction is more likely in a competitive than in a monopolistic TV industry. Overall our model predicts that cultural extinction can only occur under very special circumstances. © 2013 Royal Economic Society. ; Hauk acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, through the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres of Excellence in R&D (SEV-2011-0075) and through CICYT project number ECO2012-37065 and from the government of Catalonia ; Peer Reviewed

Thefirst three decades of African independence have been an economic, political, and social disaster. The number in absolute poverty is rising faster than anywhere else in the world, and is expected to exceed 250 million by the turn of the century. Once fine universities are in decay, and governments are chronically over-staffed and underperforming. This sad state of affairs is not simply a consequence of an unfortunate coincidence of collapsing commodity prices and mismanagement, but rather because of a fundamental flaw in the prevailing development paradigm. This was based on the erroneous proposition that state institutions derived from metropolitan models could be made the engine of development in the post-colonial era. In retrospect, it is all too obvious that the underlying cultural premises of these institutions were alien to the vast majority of Africans, and they started to crumble the moment the colonial administrators left.