The Economic Role of Culture

The doctoral dissertation theme “Cultural predictors on economic performance and foreign direct investment” stems from two major streams of thought: (1) economic research on globalization and growth models and (2) cross-cultural studies that display distinctive features of societies translated into norms, values, and behaviors. In my research I extract and emphasize cultural variables that impact economic performance and may serve as predictors to effective direct investment in the foreign countries. This research will result in mathematical modeling of relations between cultural variables and international economic data; and in empirical confirmation of hypotheses through data collection and statistical analysis. The image displays the idea of bridging research on economic performance and on culture. The black lines present the classical supply-demand chart (“economy”); and five color overlapping circles communicate the idea of five continents of the world, like famous Olympic circles (“culture”). This graphical image reflects my search for the simple interpretation of an extremely complex cross-discipline problem.