Page 295 - Cultures and Organizations

264 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

For the period 1970–95, included in our correlations with LTO-CVS,

we find that LTO-WVS still correlates with an increase in GNI per capita. 68
This is no longer the case for the period 1995–2005. Across all countries
for which we have data, the correlation between LTO-WVS and increase
in GNI per capita from 1995 to 2005 is about zero. 69
However, the post-1995 data refer neither to the same set of countries
nor to the same world economy. Our new list of countries includes nineteen
names that did not yet exist as independent economies in 1970. The former
Yugoslavia disintegrated in 1991 into Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Bos-
nia, and a loose alliance of Serbia and Montenegro. The Soviet Union also
ceased to exist in 1991 and was replaced by the Russian Federation (“Rus-
sia”) plus many new republics, of which Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus,
Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Kyrgyzstan fi gure
on our list. Czechoslovakia in 1993 split into a Czech and a Slovak republic.
The transition was accompanied by economic liberation and the opportu-
nity to develop a market economy, which the new countries each seized in
their own way. With the demise of the Soviet Union, the Soviet infl uence in
Eastern Europe also disappeared, and countries formerly under an imposed
communist economic system could now choose their own economic ways.
This applied to East Germany, which already in 1990 had reunifi ed with
West Germany, and to Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, which
later joined the European Union. By 1995 all these new economies were
supplying more or less reliable data on GNI per capita, and by 2005 one
could compare their rates of growth over the past ten years.
Cultural theories that addressed the East Asian economic miracle were
often criticized for failing to explain why East Asia did not achieve strong
economic growth much earlier. After all, its Confucian values are extremely
old. Why were they dormant for 2,500 years, triggering a miracle only

in the second half of the twentieth century? The answer to this conun-
drum was known to German sociologist Max Weber eighty years ago. He
observed that the so-called Protestant work ethic (basically another name
for the set of values related to economic growth that we discuss in this
chapter) could yield results only in a specific historical period. In our case

two conditions had to be satisfi ed:

1. Availability of Western technology and of educational resources to
use it
2. Integration of local markets into a world market of supply and
demand for goods and services