The impact of cultural and creative industries on the wealth of countries, regions and municipalities

ABSTRACT

This paper compares the total impact of cultural and creative industries (CCIs) on per capita income of countries, regions and municipalities. We estimate the total effects of CCIs in 78 developed and developing countries in 5 continents, in 275 European regions and in 518 municipalities in the European region of Valencia, using data obtained from multiple databases and nonparametric local linear least squares. The average effects of CCIs are positive in the three territorial scales, in both low- and high-income locations, and increase in conjunction with increases in development, with high and very high developed places showing greater impacts. CCIs are, thus, a powerful resource for improving the well-being of rich and poor places at all geographic scales; however, they also act as a double-edged sword, as they increase inequalities between places.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural and creative industries
• income
• development
• well-being
• inequality

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Luciana Lazzeretti, Francesco Capone, the participants in the International Workshop Rethinking Culture and Creativity in the Technological Era, and three anonymous referees for helpful comments to previous versions of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See the results in Appendix 1. The test compares the parametric specification estimated via ordinary least squares (OLS) with the nonparametric scenario.

2 Eurostat’s Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics.

3 The categories for countries came from UNDP for 2014. For the regions, the categories are assigned applying the ranks used by UNDP in 2008 to the Subnational Human Development Index 4.0 (Source: Global Data Lab). The HDI is not available for municipalities. The coincidence between GDP per capita quantiles and HDI ranks is below 40%.

4 If regional gradients are analysed by country, the incremental patterns described into this section also holds for most European countries. The exceptions would be Germany and the Netherlands.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Horizon 2020 Framework Programme [grant number 870935].