Cultural institutes: Networks and determinants

This paper documents the spread of national cultural institutes (CI's). We first build a data set of 32 cultural institutes that have foreign offices abroad. Using multiple primary sources, we compile data of the foreign locations of each CI from 1985 to the present. We next use network analysis to visualise and describe connections within the CI network. We then use a gravity model to estimate the formation of one or more CI's in a bilateral country pair. We find that factors such as population, real GDP per capita, distance, a former coloniser-colony link, a common legal system, free trading agreement and a reciprocal relationship are significant factors in the formation of a CI foreign location.