Creative Economy: A Feasible Development Option

4.4 Measures: Their limitations and potentialThere are four potential measures of activity in thecreative industries: employment, time use, trade and valueadded, and copyright and intellectual property right.However, these means are unevenly and inadequately appliedto benchmark the creative industries in either the developedor developing world. Identifying a comprehensive data setwould be extremely costly and require organizationalresources that are unrealistic. Hence, our approach istwofold: first, to try to identify at least one pragmaticmeasure that can be used for the sector; and second, to helpstimulate further data collection and monitoring by publicagencies worldwide. In part, this latter task will require theuse of new survey instruments.In this regard, the role of the relevant United Nationsorganizations is essential — in particular UNCTAD,UNESCO, WIPO and ILO, which are already working toensure that official data are collected and analysed for allcountries in the areas of their competence. It is important toensure equivalence and coherence among various internationaland national efforts in this endeavour. Some of this newdata can be collected by marginal extension of existing officialcensus and survey instruments, and it is important thata clear, overarching aspiration be shared among variousorganizations locally.4.4.1 EmploymentA recent method associated with the growth of thecreative economy has focused on ways to measure employmentgenerated. This approach is hampered by a lack ofagreement of definitions of the sector. It is also hindered bythe rate of development; either the industries are new, or justemerging, or they are unevenly concentrated in parts of theworld and hence are not an issue for some countries at themoment. In some countries there is a separate labour marketsurvey, while in others this information is collected as part ofa general census. However, this broad category of “employment”is accepted and used in other areas of economic life;thus benchmarking is possible.OccupationPerhaps the most popular measures of creative activityhave been derived from occupational analyses. Using classificationsof occupation, people are categorized as creativeworkers. One problem with this sort of measurement is thatpeople may have more than one job, the creative occupationmay pay less, and the creative occupation is often undercounted.Second, occupational measures tend to underrepresentjobs relating to the creative sector. Creative work involves genuinelycreative occupations as well as non-creative ones, somachine operators might be seen as creative workers if theyare working a printing press but not a sheet metal press.Industry/sectorEmployment by industry has been used as an alternativeto occupation in order to capture this interlinking ofactivities that comprise creative output. Again, put aside theconceptual definitions of creative activity, which attempt todistinguish between direct cultural output (a performer/performance),cultural facilitators (theatre ticket sales), and creators(script writer). Another problem with employmentdata concerns the length of time worked — whether the jobis full time (according to national norms) or fractional. Thisis particularly problematic because contract or projectemployment is common in the creative economy. Finally,there is the problem of contract and self-employment. Thiscan shade into informal work, or second jobs, or simply bemissed in census reporting as many cultural workers are inmicro enterprises or self-employed with a small turnover.Commonly, the turnover for such entities is below that onwhich data are collected. While it may legitimately be saidthat individually these are insignificant components of theeconomy, they are a significant part of the creative economyand, as this sector grows, a more significant part of thewhole economy. Given the rate of growth, it is important tomonitor these changes.Co-location/clusterCo-location has become a popular topic in discussionsof local and regional economic development and regionalcompetition. Measures of employment can give some senseof the degree of concentration of cultural employment; thisis clearly an important distributional question. However, animportant question with respect to all forms of clustering,especially that of the creative economy, is the degree of inter-4Towards an evidence-based assessment of the creative economyCREATIVE ECONOMY REPORT 201099