Cultural creative economy and urban competitiveness: How one matters to the other

ABSTRACT

This article has built a two-way analytical framework to investigate the interrelationship between the cultural creative economy (CCE) and urban competitiveness. Through operationalizing urban competitiveness into urban economic performance, urban development capacity, and urban attractiveness, this article reviews different CCE-based urban development strategies. The empirical results indicate that CCE development is related to all three aspects of urban competitiveness variables, while human capital has the largest explanatory power on both the cultural creative occupations’ concentration and cultural creative industries (CCI) output. The sectoral structure (arts, media, and design) matters in the analysis, implying that scholars should further focus on sub-CCIs in the future research. The variables have different extents of influence on the occupational concentration and industrial output data, which implies that these two different approaches should be considered distinctly.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the journal editors and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Xuefei Li

Xuefei Li is an assistant professor at the School of Public Administration at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing. He obtained his doctoral degree from the Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy at The Ohio State University. His research area is creative industries, cultural economics and cultural policy.