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The impact of related variety on the creative employment growth

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Abstract

Cultural and creative industries (CCIs) have recently become highly relevant with regard to creative economy research, as they are considered drivers of regional and urban innovation policies and economic growth. CCIs are a priority sector on the European agenda and represent an excellent opportunity to exit the current economic crisis. In the literature, the most discussed aspect of CCIs is their value creation ability, which is due to a high degree of diversity/variety, and their impact on innovation within the wider economy, which results from the activation of cross-fertilisation processes between different sectors. Evolutionary economic geography (EEG), adopting the recently established approach based on related variety, also emphasises the issues of diversity/variety as determinants of local and urban development and innovation. This interesting and complex theoretical framework has produced a considerable number of empirical studies, none of which has been specifically applied to the creative sector. With the present study, we intended to contribute to the debate on creative economy research and EEG by investigating the impact of variety in CCIs in Italy, following the related-variety approach and using a long-term employment perspective (1991–2011). The results indicated that related variety has an important effect on the growth of creative industries, characterised by high internal connections between different creative activities. Our outcomes also led us to reassess the view held by some, namely, that creative industries can actually make a strong impact on economic growth in the wider economy; this did not appear to emerge in the Italian context, according to the methodologies we used.

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Fig. 1

Source: our elaboration

Fig. 2

Source: our elaboration.

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Notes

  1. This approach aims to investigate mainly the linkages among CCIs and not between CCIs and other sectors. This is a consequence of calculating the indexes of variety, related and unrelated only within the CCIs. See Sect. 2 on this issue.

  2. The analysis of the linkages between CCIs and wider economy would require other techniques than the application of the entropy index to the CCIs. For instance, the calculation of the relatedness a làHidalgo et al. (2007) could allow the identification of this interconnections between CCIs and other industries (outside the creative domain).

  3. Other activities included in an enlarged definition are not considered, for example, tourism, enogastronomy, experience economy, fashion, and so (EC 2010).

  4. Variety is a measure of diversification among activities, which in this work is considered at a NACE 4-digit level. Unrelated-variety measures variety at a 2-digit level (for example, between the 58 NACE economic activity of publishing and the 73 of advertising), while related variety is measured at a 4-digit level in the 2-digit classification (for example, considering within the 58 of publishing, the codes 58.11, 58.13, 58.14, etc.).

  5. We remind that variety is the general concept combining related and unrelated variety. Related variety is determined by the correlations of sub-industries within the same creative industry, and unrelated variety is identified by the correlations among different CCIs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics and Management, University of Florence, Via delle pandette 9, 50127, Florence, Italy

    Luciana Lazzeretti, Niccolò Innocenti & Francesco Capone

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  1. Luciana Lazzeretti
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  2. Niccolò Innocenti
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  3. Francesco Capone
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Correspondence to Luciana Lazzeretti.

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Lazzeretti, L., Innocenti, N. & Capone, F. The impact of related variety on the creative employment growth. Ann Reg Sci 58, 491–512 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00168-016-0805-2

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