In search of a Mediterranean creativity. Cultural and creative industries in Italy, Spain and Turkey

ABSTRACT

The Mediterranean region has been increasingly receiving attention in recent years. This is due to the heterogeneity of the countries composing it, which raises several problems in business collaborations, but also unfolds several cross-national economic opportunities among Mediterranean countries. The analysis of cultural and creative industries can be useful to show that this area has many similarities, making intercultural exchange and cross-national economic development possible. This research starts from the comparison of three main Mediterranean countries situated both in Europe and outside, Italy, Spain and Turkey, and aims at highlighting the most striking similarities and differences of their features. The creativity specialization found in this region is alike, which allows us to begin to discuss the idea of a Mediterranean creativity.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural and creative industries
• Mediterranean area
• creativity
• Spain
• Italy and Turkey

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Interesting countries could be Greece and France, but at the moment there are no data available at the three-digit level in 2011. Eurostat provides data at the NUTS2 level for the year 2012, but such data have a territorial level only at the level of regions.

2. http://toolkit.creativemed.eu/.

3. The differences between NACE and SIC codes do not create significant problems because the systems have the same items at the highest levels.

4. Since data on a few industries at the four-digit level are not available yet for 2011 for Turkey, four-digit data for 2009 are used to calculate approximations of them for 2011.

5. A threshold limit of 1% of the nationwide creative employment has been used so as to avoid considering very small places with high LQ like in other contributions.

6. The chart does not adopt a threshold value for the minimum number of employees of a region. Therefore, Utrecht is in the first position.

7. North Europe includes Denmark, Luxemburg, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Austria, Germany, Finland and the UK. South Europe includes Malta, Cyprus, Greece, Spain, Italy and France. Other countries are included in East Europe.