Cultural heritages: From official to informal

•Culture produces many different heritages but economic analysis favours official heritages.•Informal heritages are less defined and less studied but they have strong economic and social effects; thus, their economic stakes are huge.•We try to widen the scope of heritage analysis by a renewed conception of heritage.

International organizations define and legitimate 'official' heritages. Yet a heritage policy must go beyond the definition and management of a list of elements belonging to a given heritage. Informal, non-official heritages (from handicraft traditions and recipes, to languages) play a growing role in both the working of modern economies and the quality of social life. To build an economic analysis of informal heritages, we propose reaching beyond the pro-official-heritage bias of the standard economic analysis by widening the notion of heritages on the basis of specific economic and sociological analyses. Next, we apply this broadening to the study of the informal heritages' consequences on both the economy and social life. We conclude that, since informal heritages are at work in the economy and in social life as much as - and even more than - formal heritages, it is high time we extended economic analysis to these new fields and came up with new ways of managing informal heritages!