Countries with great wealth or natural abundance often fall victim to their own blessings. Economists have long known that resource-rich countries can get stuck in cycles of slow economic growth, intense environmental degradation and weak democratic institutions. Places endowed with a unique artistic and architectural heritage can also suffer from this “resource curse.” Breathtaking monuments from a storied past can generate economic rents and sectoral distortions not unlike those created by large reserves of fossil fuels and precious minerals.
Venice is a case in point. Plagued with fast-paced, cheap tourism, it increasingly suffers from a “beauty curse.” The city’s decision earlier this year to charge an entry fee of 5 euros (US$5.53) for day-trippers merely confirms the larger problem: Venice is on its way to becoming an open-air museum — a cultural mausoleum.
Natural resources and architectural beauty are not as dissimilar as they might seem. Both are scarce and geographically concentrated. In the case of Venice, the city is an extraordinary architectural masterpiece; even its smallest buildings might contain works by some of the world’s greatest artists — from Giorgione and Titian to Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese. That is why UNESCO’s World Heritage designation for Venice comprises the city in its entirety, rather than select buildings or neighborhoods.
Illustration: Yusha
However, such immense architectural and cultural wealth can create an economic trap. When just a few lucrative extractive industries attract most of the human and financial capital in an economy, they can crowd out investment in other sectors, ultimately preventing sectoral diversification and impairing overall competitiveness. This dynamic is known as “Dutch disease,” because it is precisely what happened in the Netherlands following its discovery of a large natural-gas field in the late 1950s.
In Venice, the high demand for tourist-related services that guarantee large markups has crowded out the supply of services for residents. As a result, the historic city is becoming increasingly uninhabitable.
Its population has fallen from 150,000 in the 1960s to about 50,000 today, and neighborhoods with fewer tourist attractions already look like ghost towns. Buildings are abandoned, streets are empty and grocery shops are almost nonexistent.
The only sparks of real life are the few traditional bars (bacari) that remain operational. University students animate an otherwise sleepy nightlife, and the few cultural events target tourists, whose number keeps rising.
Two decades ago, Venice had a little more than 2 million overnight visitors per year; by 2022, that figure had reached 3.2 million, and the number of day-trippers was about 30 million. Unsurprisingly, the few Venetians left are directly or indirectly employed in the tourism sector, resulting in economic desertification of the rest of the city.
With traditional industries such as chemicals and steel disappearing, Italy’s development ministry has declared the situation in Venice and its environs an industrial crisis.
To be sure, the beauty curse is not exclusive to Venice. The economies of many small villages and towns around the world have been completely captured by tourism. In large and well-developed cities such as Barcelona or Rome, mass tourism is increasingly a threat to the quality of life of their inhabitants.
Nonetheless, the scale of the problem in Venice is astonishing. This is not some small medieval village with a future that only lies in capitalizing on its past. Venice is a large European city that could aspire to be something different.
Once the seat of a prosperous empire, it was a bridge between the West and the East for centuries. Even if daily life in a city on the water is not easy, Venice has always managed it.
The entry fee, which was introduced as a pilot program between April and mid-July, is expected to be reintroduced next year on a permanent basis and possibly doubled. It is unlikely to dissuade fast-paced tourism.
Although it would help to absorb some of the costs that tourism generates (such as for waste collection and disposal), it would not reverse the city’s decline. After all, most of its other civic initiatives are focused on the threat of sea-level rise.
As necessary as these efforts are, they would only preserve the existing architectural beauty, rather than doing anything to revitalize the city. The palaces would still become museums, because nobody wants to live in them.
The situation demands a comprehensive, long-term strategy to repopulate the Laguna Veneta. By attracting talent from around the world, Venice could transform itself into a flourishing, dynamic global cultural and commercial center once again.
It could rediscover the ingenuity, inventiveness, and industriousness that made it so great in the past.
The goal should be not merely to preserve and exploit its artistic and cultural heritage, but to expand it. That means going beyond the extractive approach that is slowly bleeding the city dry.
Artistic beauty, like natural resources, should be a blessing, but without proper management and an ambitious strategy, looks can kill.
Edoardo Campanella, senior fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, is coauthor (with Marta Dassu) of Anglo Nostalgia: The Politics of Emotion in a Fractured West.
Project Syndicate
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
I have heard people equate the government’s stance on resisting forced unification with China or the conditional reinstatement of the military court system with the rise of the Nazis before World War II. The comparison is absurd. There is no meaningful parallel between the government and Nazi Germany, nor does such a mindset exist within the general public in Taiwan. It is important to remember that the German public bore some responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. Post-World War II Germany’s transitional justice efforts were rooted in a national reckoning and introspection. Many Jews were sent to concentration camps not
RSS