Creative Economy: A Feasible Development Option

Box 3.1The Tecnobrega caseTecnobrega, a music style that originated in the Pará State in northern Brazil, is revolutionizing the nation’s music market. The Paraense brega music marketis a dynamic sector of Belém’s economy: it moves parties, sound systems, artists, studios, DJs, party planners, party and concert houses, promotionventures and the sale of many related products. It provides livelihoods for a vast number of professionals and artists, as well as a source of revenue andtaxation for the local public sector.Participants in the tecnobrega business often play multiple roles. A studio DJ, for example, can also be a street vendor or a sound system DJ. A band singermight also be a producer or party planner. DJs and singers are also composers and CD producers, reporters or radio and television hosts. The relationshipbetween actors is not just monetary, but also highly social.The tecnobrega market has developed an alternative model for producing and distributing compact discs operates in parallel to the formal industry model.“The mapping of this business model allows us not only to understand this new structure, but mainly to think of the possibility of its replication,” writesLemos Ronaldo. “To this, four aspects merit consideration: the innovation with value, the ‘technology cultivation’, the promotion system based on the NARPs(Non-Authorized Re-Producers), and the absence of payment to the individual who is only the composer”.Copyrights are traded by how many times a song is played in radios within the city and also by the multiplication of CDs in the informal market. Makingownership rights more flexible may result in greater feedback, in terms of promotions and contacts, than if they followed the formal rules of intellectualproperty rights.3Analysing the creative economy“Innovation is an important aspect of the bregueiro universe,” Ronaldo writes. “It talks about not only the incorporation of new technological apparatus,but also the demonstration of the personal creativity of the artist.” Competition among the actors involved is fundamental, as it motivates them to seek outnew forms of action and problem solving.Source: Lemos Ronaldo (2008). “The Tecnobrega Business Model Arising from Belém do Pará”, International Development Research Centre, Rio de Janeiro.By Simon Evans, a cultural entrepreneur and founder of Creative Clusters Ltd.3.3.3 Inter-industry analysisOne of the most long-standing techniques for studyinginter-industry relations is input-output analysis. Itscapacity to depict the ways in which output is produced anddistributed in the economy, and to capture the direct, indirectand induced effects on industries, consumers and governmentof a range of external stimuli is well known. Inregard to the usefulness of input-output as a tool for economicimpact analysis in the arts and cultural industries, twoconsiderations stand out. The first is that few input-outputtables that have been constructed for whole economies orparts thereof have contained a sufficiently detailed breakdownof the arts and cultural industries. Often the arts willbe included, if at all, under “recreation”, “leisure”, “otherservices”, or some other categorization too broad to enablemeaningful analysis of the cultural sector. The second problemis common to all input-output studies, namely, the stringentdata requirements. Even input-output tables constructedat a relatively high level of aggregation can be estimatedonly after extensive data gathering, including the necessity ofsome data collection from primary sources. The combinationof these two problems places a serious constraint on theextent to which input-output analysis can be used for studyingeconomic impact in the creative sector.Some close relatives of input-output analysis may besomewhat easier to apply. For example, social accountingmatrices are not quite so demanding of data and yet enablea similar sort of analysis of the inter-industry effects of economicchange. These matrices came into vogue during the1970s and 1980s, especially at the World Bank, where theywere exhaustively investigated as a workable tool for developmentplanning. At that time, interest focused on the traditionalsources of growth in developing countries — such asagriculture, secondary industries and infrastructure. Now,amid growing recognition of creative industries as a source ofeconomic growth in developing countries, social accountingmatrices may enjoy a revival of interest as a means towardsmore rigorous analysis of the economic functions of theseindustries — assuming that the necessary data can be found,which is not yet the case.One aspect of inter-industry relationships that maynot be fully picked up in the above-mentioned forms ofanalysis is the existence of beneficial spillovers from the creativesector to other parts of the economy. Generally it is veryCREATIVE ECONOMY REPORT 201079