Bridging the gap in creative economy and ICT research: a regional analysis in Europe

ABSTRACT

Following Florida’s seminal work on the ‘creative class’ there is a great deal of interest concerning whether creativity, as an input, is important for regional growth. Answering this question requires developing a production framework that can distinguish creativity from other inputs. With data from Europe, this paper integrates the concept of information and communications technology (ICT) and the creative class into a theoretical production function. Findings reveal that not only is there a positive and interactive relationship between creative workers and ICT, but the combination of creative workers and ICT leads to higher levels of GVA growth. Moreover, creative workers were found to have a larger impact on growth in comparison with traditional human capital measures (i.e. graduates). Thus, findings from this research suggest that the creative class should not only pay attention to socio-economic preferences of individuals, but it must include wider social resources, such as ICT.

KEYWORDS:

• Creative Class
• Human Capital
• ICT
• Regional Economic Development
• Europe

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• R10
• O10
• J00

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The wage data was collected from European Structural Earning Survey.

² This is the largest sample data we can collect from EU LFS with the valid variables that can be used in this study.

³ In the U.K., data is only available at NUTS 1 level from the EU LFS.

⁴ 365/7 = 52.143$\approx$52.

⁵ The user cost for asset type k is estimated by $p_{k,t-1}^I{i}_t+{\delta }_k{p}_{k,t}^I-\left(p_{k,t}^I-p_{k,t-1}^I\right)$ with $i_t$ representing the nominal return, ${\delta }_t$ the depreciation rate of asset type and investment price of asset type k.

⁶ The involvement of an interaction completely changes the way of interpreting results. Now the partial effect of the creative class or ICT on GVA growth not only depends on the accumulation of its individual input but also their interactive effect; thus, the insignificance of the independent effects only indicates that when the value of ICT or the creative class is given to 0, the partial effect of the creative class or ICT is not significiant at the regional level. In reality, a region with 0 ICT or creative capital reserve does not exist.