I am glad Liverpool is putting its money on Gustav Klimt and Anton Chekhov to seal its identity as a City of Culture rather than staging yet another tribute to the Beatles. The programme it announced this week to mark its year as Europe’s cultural epicentre in 2008 includes Shakespeare, Britten, Heaney and Rattle, along with a suitably eclectic mix of raffish exhibitions (I liked the one featuring designer clothing, as worn by footballers’ wives) plus the Turner Prize. It will celebrate the roots of northern culture, but it will be international in outlook.

So far so good. But what matters is not so much the party as the aftermath. By the time it is over, Liverpool will have invested close on £3 billion, not just on the programme, but also on what amounts to a massive facelift for the city. It will have created a new museum, conference centre, retail complex and galleries, refurbished its waterfront, improved its transport system and done its level best to transform its image from gritty, if run-down, Victorian port to cultural icon of the post-industrial age. What, however, will sustain it? Does the sheer accolade of the title inject new life into a city, or could it all collapse on the morning after, when the caravan has moved on, and all that is left are some fancy buildings and a massive hangover?

It has now almost a cliché to say that go-ahead cities need cultural symbols to aid their regeneration. Yesterday’s warehouses and factories are converted into concert halls or galleries. An arts festival takes the place of a manufacturing strategy. A city like Bilbao establishes its credentials by erecting a museum designed by Frank Gehry. Glasgow signals its new image by refurbishing its Kelvingrove Gallery. The East End of London will become Olympic City. But is that a foundation strong enough to sustain a lasting economy? Or is it the equivalent of pyramid selling — a fragile structure built on promises, with layers of apparent activity concealing a hollow emptiness at its heart?

Conscious, perhaps, of the risks ahead, Liverpool is holding a conference at Aintree today on the impact that culture can have on local economies and regeneration. Delegates will doubtless hear stirring examples of how investment in the arts has attracted business by transforming the image of a city, drawing in creative talent and making it a more attractive place to work in. The reality is less clear-cut. A European Commission report which looked at 29 cities that had been designated Cities of Culture, found that, while economic growth had been among their principal aims, it had proved impossible to demonstrate that any definable growth had resulted. “With the exception of tourism, there is no clear evidence that the European Cities of Culture action has been used to create a platform from which to advance ‘investability’,” was its bleak conclusion. Those cities that thrived had been thriving anyway. Those that were failing continue to fail. Some of them had used “the rhetoric of economic success”, but had not managed to provide the evidence to back it up. Others, said the report candidly, “had simply preferred ‘not to know’.” The money had been spent, and that was that.

The most salutary example was Salonika, chosen by the Greek Government in a blatantly political attempt to transform it into “the metropolis of the Balkans”. Museums and galleries were erected with no expense spared, and hundreds of thousands of visitors poured in during its year in the limelight. Nine years on, it is still paying the cost. Unable to attract sufficient numbers of tourists to fill its halls and pay for their maintenance, it spends its time trying to extract money owed to it by the Greek Government, and dealing with litigation arising from its bid.

Other cities have shrugged off the need to demonstrate economic benefits by creating their own definitions of success. Lille, City of Culture in 2004, grandly described itself as “a spaceship changing the fabric of time”, rather than anything as banal as a model for regeneration.

Even Glasgow, which is often cited as a byword for urban reinvention, and which brought the Bolshoi, the Berlin Philharmonic, Pavarotti and Sinatra to the city in 1990, failed to capitalise on its success. Fourteen years on, an academic study concluded that there had been no sustainable economic development as a result of the award, that local politicians had failed to build on it and that their achievements were “opportunistic rather than strategic”. Only now, with a leadership that understands the need to link public investment in the arts with private sector initiatives, have the indicators of economic success — a rising population, the growth of small businesses and the creation of new jobs — begun to suggest that the city is responding to treatment.

Liverpool has set itself the target of becoming a tourist city, changing its image, drawing in visitors, staging big arts events and reversing its population decline by making it a more attractive place to do business in. It deserves to succeed, if only because of the way it has already turned its back on its disastrous political history, and because its people have an unquenchable spirit and a pride in their own identity; I have no doubt that by the end of 2008 Klimt, Chekhov and the rest of them will have become honorary scousers.

It should not, however, forget that only through wealth creation can growth be guaranteed. Or, as John Lennon once said, when asked what he would do after Beatlemania had subsided: “Count the money.”

Times Recommends

• In the real world, the public sector must pay
• Playing politics in a land of double Dutch
• Be like the plinth people: not set in stone