Living in Peru : your everyday companion

An apt anecdote to illustrate this point occurred at a seminar I attended in March at Georgetown, where one of the panel members was Madeline Albright. I had the opportunity to ask Mrs. Albright her opinion on Jeffrey Sach’s initiative to set aside 0.7% of the GDP of rich countries to aid developing countries. The former Secretary of State, noting that I was Peruvian, said that she thought that my fellow countryman, Hernando de Soto, had a better idea about the “legal empowerment of the poor” and that she was working with the Peruvian economist on this very issue at a global level. As a result of the IBD Congress in 2004 and the successful ALCUE and APEC summits held last year, Peru is on the world radar and all things Peruvian are beginning to globalize. In our development strategy, it is important to focus on our cultural industries where we have comparative advantages. Countries like Spain have been able to capitalize on this point very effectively.

In 2005, tourism in Spain represented 12.1% of the GDP as the number of visitors went from 30 million in 1995 to 54 million in 2005. It would be a fair to say that the industrial revolution of the 21st century will take place in tourism and that this sector will be responsible for generating more employment. Fifty-four percent (54%) of tourism in 2004, meaning 412 million visitors, chose Europe as a destination: 75 million visited France, 53 million went to Spain and 37 million visited Italy. The entire city of Bilbao, like others around the world, has based its prosperity on creating a museum and an interesting cultural offering. The same is true of Malaga, which attracts tourism with the Picasso Museum.

If only 20% of the tourists that visit Spain were to come to Peru, we would increase the number of visitors five-fold to reach 10 million a year. I also think that it is very important, as part of a business and country strategy, to promote and invest in cinema. Just imagine what an Andean epic about Manco Inca, produced in the style of Mel Gibson’s Hollywood blockbuster “Braveheart,” could do for the country’s image, confidence levels, collective self-esteem and cultural tourism! A world-class production of Vargas Llosa’s The Bad Girl: a Novel would put Lima on a par with Buenos Aires, New York, Tokyo or Vancouver as a cosmopolitan and modern city.

Cultural economics is new academic discipline that is virtually unknown in Peru. Nevertheless, it is attracting the interest of development economists. According to Spanish researcher Manuel Ramos, cultural industries have the potential, in only a few years, to generate more business volume worldwide than the oil and arms industries. As such, interest in this topic is more than justifiable. According to Dr. Ramos, historic legacies can constitute a great business.

For example, the Monet exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995 attracted 960,000 visitors over a period of nineteen weeks. Its impact on Chicago’s economy was estimated at 300 million dollars. The Cezanne exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1996 attracted 550,000 visitors during its thirteen-week run, generating a volume of ten thousand overnight stays at area hotels. This event alone generated an extra 86.5 million dollars for the city and speaks volumes about the economic force of a robust industry of culture. It is now time for our writers, painters, historians, archaeologists and museologists to join cultured, intelligent and audacious businessmen to develop Peru’s cultural offering, which is as irresistible as Vargas Llosa’s bad girl, esthetically stunning as Macedonio’s paintings and backed by the ancestral and age-old strength of Andean culture.

tags : braveheart, peru, tourism, vargas llosa, mel gibson

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4 Comments

# Koshine, Chang says :
21 May, 2009 [ 08:03 ]

I have been to Peru two times, and I love it very much. 

# jcwong says :
22 May, 2009 [ 12:13 ]

Congrats LIP, this is an excellent article and the reason why I read your weekly page. Positive, well written, informative and illustrative, a very good analysis of the economic potential of the tourism industry in Peru.
jcwong

# M Luki says :
22 May, 2009 [ 11:29 ]

Great article! I like the ideas.
But, i don't think that a movie/production is going to put Lima on par with the other cities you mentioned.

# EC says :
29 May, 2009 [ 11:26 ]

Peru does not have to invent anything. Inca culture (and pre-Inca)speaks for itself. During the 300 years of Yale, they recreated an Inca robot talking to a chasqui robot (runner bringing the news in the old empire) a whole conversation in Quechua, using some the objects that the museum had at that time. I thought that was pretty amazing. Imagine doing an exhibition of the Inca and Pre Inca culture in Lima, a city of 8 million people.

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