Entrepreneurship and social norms about thrift versus sharing: the Chinese-Tahitian experience

Abstract

This article establishes a link between entrepreneurship and a new ‘cultural dimension’: thrift vs. sharing. This cultural dimension measures what is the overriding social norm in a group: thrift or sharing. Our first hypothesis states that long winters with annual harvests fostered thrift while foraging and tropical horticulture and continuous harvesting fostered sharing. Our second hypothesis states that thrift promotes entrepreneurship, while sharing hampers it. We find empirical support for both hypotheses when comparing indigenous Polynesians and the Hakka Chinese minority in Tahiti, French Polynesia.

Keywords:

• Chinese diaspora
• climate and culture
• cultural dimensions
• entrepreneurship
• French Polynesia
• social norms
• South Pacific

Notes

1. A possible exception is a recent article published in 2016 in the American Economic Review about the ‘Agricultural Origins of Time Preference’, linking ancestral agricultural conditions and practices in different regions of the world to modern cultural norms and values such as long-term orientation (Galor and Ozak 2016). But this paper does not link long-term orientation with a cultural dimension opposing thrift and sharing as we do.