Creative economy and employment quality in large urban areas in Spain

Abstract

The impact of the economic crisis should act as an incentive to devise less vulnerable economic development models for Spanish cities. This study confirms that the impact of the creative economy, one of the most interesting initiatives in this context, remains very limited. Furthermore, microdata obtained from a sample of one million workers in Spain, published annually by the Social Security system, confirm that the sharp contrasts emerging in employment quality between sectors and regions, the processes of ‘precariousness of talent’ and labour dualization expressed through inequalities in the occupational structure are each becoming significant threats to viable economic development. For the creative economy to be an effective instrument for metropolitan regeneration, adapted to suit the specificities of particular urban development paths, an improved understanding of the inherent complexity of creative-economy employment relations is required.

Keywords:

• creative economy
• creative trident
• Spanish metropolises
• employment quality

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank José Manuel Rojo (CSIC) and three anonymous referees for their constructive and useful comments.

Funding

This research was financed by R&D&I Plan projects CSO2012-36170 and ECO2011-30323-C03-01, and by the National programme ‘Ramón y Cajal’ of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, in which Simón Sánchez-Moral takes part.

Notes

^1. The definition of Large Urban Areas (LUAs) is taken from the Spanish Ministry for Housing, applied to the spatial information available in the CSWH on the province as place of work (not of residence).

^2. According to Eurostat, the creative economy in Spain consists of 725,900 jobs, which is slightly below the European Union average (3.8% vs. 4.4%). The European Commission’s ranking for the cultural and creative industries place the urban region of Île de France (279,361 jobs) at the top, with Madrid (164,269) and Barcelona (139,278) in the fourth and fifth places, respectively, displaying significant specialization values (European Cluster Observatory, 2010). In addition, the impact of the economic crisis on the creative industries has had a visible effect on employment, which for the LUAs, as a whole, fell by 7.6% between 2009 and 2012, much less than in the remaining activities (–17.42%).

^3. Only university education, medium or higher level, is considered here. However, the information on educational levels of the Municipal Census is not completely updated, which results in their underestimation.

^4. The salary variable includes only the gross monetary remuneration of the worker, but not other forms of payment. However, as the fiscal competences are transferred in the case of the Basque Country, the information on Bilbao only refers to a small number of residents who pay tax outside the region, and it is therefore not comparable with the other LUAs.

^5. The proxy variable of size provides indirect information on the average number of employees belonging to the contracting firm or public institution. The presence of large public institutions and commercial firms and the absence of information about self-employment cause the average figures to rise. In addition, unlike the other variables, which use the worker as the reference, the unit reference here is the firm/public institution. The potential existence of unobserved heterogeneity in this variable could prevent an appropriate interpretation of the Bonferroni tests, so this has not been performed in this case.

^6. These figures include self-employment, which in the creative industries represents 13.9% of the total compared with only 11.1% of other activities. Although in some cases, this self-employment conceals a certain level of precarious work, in others, it responds to the nature of some activities in the more flexible environment of culture or arts.

^7. To check the robustness of the results, the analysis was repeated with the Spanish Labour Force Survey-LFS (2010) data. Although the CSWH and LFS do not have the same classification of occupations, the results are coherent in the three categories of employment in creative (1.82%) and noncreative occupations (1.74%), both within creative industries, and in creative occupations outside them (18.51%). In both cases, the divergence with the original NESTA models can be seen in relation to the overreach of creative employment in the rest of the economy, caused by too broad a definition of occupations. At the same time, not including self-employed workers could be particularly penalizing the group of workers in creative occupations within the creative industries.