Evaluating the quality of UNESCO World Heritage List: a comparison with the Baedeker’s guidebooks

This study verifies whether the number of criteria of Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) satisfied by a site in the UNESCO World Heritage List (WHL) can be considered as an ordinal measure of its quality against the alternative hypotheses that: a) quality can be measured just dichotomously, by inclusion in the WHL); b) the multiplicity of existing OUV is just meant to capture alternative aesthetic criteria expressed by different cultures. This issue is important for both scientific and policy reasons. To avoid problems of endogeneity and reverse causality, we examine the correlation between the number of satisfied criteria and the evaluation of the site’s quality made by an authoritative travel guidebook that pre-existed UNESCO, the Baedeker’s guide of the early twentieth century. Exploiting a newly assembled dataset on 234 UNESCO World Heritage Sites (WHS) in 10 European countries from 11 Baedeker’s guidebooks, from 1899 to 1911, we proxy the Baedeker’s evaluations of quality by four measures: (1) total number of citations of the site; (2) weighted number of citations; (3) average length of the paragraphs with at least one citation; and (4) sentiment expressed in the text. All these measures appear positively and significantly correlated with the number of UNESCO criteria that the site satisfies, using a variety of strategies and robustness checks, confirming that they are an informative ordinal proxy for the quality of UNESCO WHS. Moreover, this analysis brings evidence to bear on the debate about the formation and persistence of UNESCO experts’ evaluations over time.