Can Intangible Cultural Heritage Resources Stimulate Regional Entrepreneurial Activity?—Empirical Evidence from the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region

Abstract

In line with the world’s goals of sustainable development, cultural resources are now being used to promote both cultural inheritance and regional economic revitalisation. This paper studies whether intangible cultural heritage (ICH) resources can promote regional entrepreneurial activity by analyzing panel data from 14 prefecture-level cities in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China, from 2007 to 2023. The empirical results indicate that ICH resources significantly promote entrepreneurial activity in Guangxi; specifically, both the stock of ICH projects and the stock of inheritors show significantly positive effects, and the findings remain robust after a series of tests. The results suggest that ICH can be used to carry cultural values and serve as a resource for place-based development that supports entrepreneurship through heritage commercialisation, cultural consumption and local industrial integration. This study incorporates ICH into the regional entrepreneurship analysis framework, providing new empirical evidence for the economic value of cultural heritage and its role in innovation-driven development.