Policy recommendations to strenghten and support the creative economy.

 

◊ At the UN level 

(A) Commit and contribute to the centering of cultural and creative industries as a driver of trade, development and national and regional systems of innovation;

 (B) Recognize, acknowledge and address the historical, embedded and deeply rooted nature of global inequality, particularly as it relates to the development of cultural, creative and technological systems and their linkages to the globalization of trade; 

(C) Place greater emphasis on the social and developmental benefits of the creative and technological sectors; 

(D) Galvanize the support to capitalize an innovation fund aimed at financing the development and commercialization of content and solutions emerging from creative industries in developing and least developed countries;

 (E) Reinforce work in this area at the United Nations Secretariat to support countries in their efforts to nurture their creative industries to maximize their respective trade and development goals. 

◊ At the country level 

(A) Recognize cultural and creative industries as a pillar of development and the nurturing of creativity as central to the building of national and regional systems of technological innovation.

 (B) Reconceptualize the idea of the creative industries in ways that consider the unique national and regional realities of the developing countries, including the understanding that national and regional financing and enterprise development ecosystems must be designed to facilitate the emergence and commercialization of ideas, content, creations, solutions and indigenous technology platforms; 

(C) Form and support a national body to promote and nurture the development of cultural and creative industries fueled by people’s creative imaginations and emerging digital technologies; 

(D) Promote and support governmental, academic and private sector partnerships for research and development at the intersections of the creative sector and digitalization. 

◊ At the academic level 

 There is need to launch more projects that will serve to better understand digital creative goods and services in developing countries and in their contribution towards development. The contribution of Mode 3 trade in services (physical presence) to the creative economy is a new field of research. Together with Mode 4 (export of services through the movement of natural persons), is poorly covered by trade statistics. Yet, they deserve a mention in any forward-looking strategy, due to their economic relevance. Mode 3 is probably more relevant to developed economies and Mode 4 to developing ones, but –once again—things are changing rapidly. There is also a need to do more research on measuring digital creative products and services, and data collection and analysis. 

 The use of creative products by domestic industries and households is probably more important from a development point of view than pure exports. Thus, in addition to the traditional indicators based on trade and production, it is desirable to have a measure of domestic use (production plus imports, minus exports). The domestic approach is also more in line with the SDGs philosophy, as it measures consumption of cultural and creative products and has direct implications on household welfare. 

 Yet, it remains difficult to measure the domestic production of creative products for most developing countries. A possible approach would be to apply the “creative trident methodology” (Higgs, Cunning and Bakhshi, 2008), which focuses on employment, rather than production or trade data. The Trident Methodology distinguishes three categories of creative labour: (a) “specialist” mode: workers within a creative profession (determined by occupations) within a creative sector (determined by industries); (b) “support” mode: workers in a non-creative profession within a creative sector; and (c) “embedded” mode: workers in a creative occupation outside the creative industries. We may need to start the conversation at the United Nations level and encourage intergovernmental working group on measuring and understanding creative economy. UNCTAD’s intergovernmental pillar could be instrumental in this regard.

  The process of digitalizing the economy opens the possibility of integrating MSMEs into developing economies to global value chains in the creative economy. For example, when Pixar comes up with leading creative ideas, it incorporates enterprises in other countries (e.g., Costa Rica) for creative production process elements. This in turn has given rise to a business model of digital animation where enterprises in tertiary countries use the income from international business as base cashflow while, at the same time, developing their own IP as well.

  New technologies open access to digital content, reducing production costs, increasing exposure and fostering innovative forms of financing, allowing for an explosion of creativity. Streaming makes up to 59 per cent of digital revenues, and digital revenues make up at least 50 per cent of the share of total recorded music industry At the same time, creativity becomes a new territory of exploitation for media corporations with revenues returned to creators of online content representing only 7.2 per cent of global royalties (UNESCO, 2018). Applications to generate new content through artificial intelligence are being used by artists, programmers, engineers, mathematicians, architects, designers, computer animators, etc. Yet, the public sector may lose its agency in the creative sector if it fails to address the rise and market concentration of large platforms that control data and have a monopoly on artificial intelligence.