MODELLING TOURISM AND CULTURE EXPENDITURE IN ROMANIA – EVIDENCE OF CHANGE IN CULTURAL VALUES

Abstract

The world is constantly changing. And the pace of this change seems to be faster and faster. National culture is no exception. Although long viewed as difficult to change, cultural values also seem to be subject to the pressure of change. The importance of leisure time, considered a characteristic of indulgent cultures, is subject of analysis in this paper. The main purpose of this paper is to analyse whether the evolution of expenditures on tourism and cultural activities has had an upward evolution so as to justify the increase in the share of people who attach great importance to leisure time. To achieve this goal, we analysed the secondary data from WVS and performed a mathematical modelling of two sets of statistical data for the interval 2000 and 2020. The results showed that the growing importance of leisure time suggested by the analysis of WVS data is also supported by the evolution of spending on tourism and cultural activities. the implications are multiple. The question is whether cultural values are stable enough to be used in the cultural characterization of countries based on scores of cultural dimensions. Of course, research on several other cultural values is needed.