Valuing Australian copyright industries

A report released last month by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the Australian Copyright Council, titled Making the Intangible Tangible, the Economic Contribution of Australia’s Copyright Industries, found that Australia’s copyright industries in 2007:

• employed more than 837,000 people (8 percent of the nation’s workforce) – up 21 percent since 1996;
• generated $97.7 billion in economic activity (10.3 percent of GDP) – up 66 percent since 1996; and
• accounted for $6.8 billion in exports (4.1 percent of all exports) – up 6.3 percent since 1996.

According to Ms Libby Baulch, Executive Officer, Australian Copyright Council, copyright was vital for innovative businesses looking to develop new products for the Australian market and for export and that “research has shown that intangible assets, such as intellectual property, represent an increasingly significant proportion of most companies’ value ... The facts are that copyright industries have increased their share of GDP and employment over the past decade while other industries such as agriculture, forestry and fishing have gone backwards.”

These figures would place the copyright industries in Australia slightly below the United States in terms of overall economic contribution (10.3% of GDP as compared to 11.1%).

For more read here.

Cultural Policy

Cultural Policy Lecture

I am doing a lecture tomorrow night for the unit Creative Industries: Theory and Policy, which my colleague Mark Bahnisch co-ordinates at QUT, on the topic of cultural policy. My presentation is below.

Cultural Policy Lecture

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The presentation is timely as I attended the launch of The Cultural Economy. Edited by Stuart Cunningham from QUT, this book is the second volume of a series being edited for Sage by Helmut Anheier and Yudhishthir Raj Isar as part of their Cultures and Globalization series.



At the launch, Helmut Anheier emphasised the importance of conceiving of the relationship between cultures and globalization as a two-way street. Globalization is shaping and reshaping cultures of course, but cultures also shape the forms that globalization takes. This approach is in contrast to the more naive approaches to globalization common in the 1990s, which saw globalization as a force driven by economics or technology, which then acted on cultures, for good or ill.

In their Introduction to the book, Stuart Cunningham, John Banks and Jason Potts draw attention to four models of culture and the economy:

1. A welfare or subsidy model, where the arts are seen as unique and different to the economy, and where there is no little or no correlation between artistic or cultural value and economic value;
2. A competitive model, where the cultural industries are seen as 'like other businesses', except with some distinctive economic features;
3. A growth model, characterizing the creative industries, where they are seen as drivers of the new economy;
4. An innovation model, where the spectrum of practices associated with the arts and culture begin to permeate all aspects of the 21t century creative economy.
   

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Creative Industries after a decade

This is a presentation I will be giving to QUT students in the Creative Industries: Theory and Policy unit on Thursday 14 August. It draws upon a presentation that I gave to staff and students at Indiana University in the US in May. It aims to outline the complex labour market dynamics of the creative industries, both in term of how they differ from other economic sectors, and how they differ from one another. It draws upon both Australian and UK data, and upon the work undertaken by Stuart Cunningham and Peter Higgs at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation.

Ci Theory And Policy Guest Lecture 14 Aug 08

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Creative Industries, Culture and Policy

My reason for being on leave from QUT at present is to complete a book for Sage. The book will be called Creative Industries, Culture and Policy, and is to be published in 2009.

In order to solicit feedback in advance of publication, I am making draft chapters available for comment. These are not to be reproduced, and only to be quoted with permission. I would, however, welcome comment on the blog.

Chapter One deals with the development of creative industries policy in Britain from the mid 1990s to the present. I argue that it has its origin in the 'local socialism' initiatives of various UK local councils in the 1980s and early 1990s, as well as the question of what may constitute a 'post-industrial' Britain after the economic changes of the Thatcher-Major years.

The chapter look at the original Department of Culture, Media and Sport 'list-based' approach to the creative industries and the criticisms of it. It look at further issues arising, such as regionalisation, the role of the arts, and the significance attached to design in the 2006 Cox Report.

It concludes with a consideration of the approaches taken by NESTA and The Work foundation to capacity building in the creative industries sectors.

If you are interested in downloading the draft chapter, it can be found here.

I would welcome feedback on the chapter. In particular, it does not at this stage have a conclusion, as I am thinking through the relationship of creative industries policy to the current, and seemingly terminal, electoral malaise of Gordon Brown's Labour government, and the question of whether this would continue to be a priority policy area under a future Conservative government.

Creative Economy 2008 - New UNCTAD Report

A new report by the United Nations Commission on Trade, Aid and Development has come out called Creative Economy 2008. It provides the useful compendium yet of both thinking around this topic and statistical evidence from countries throughout the world. It also points to the next stage in the debate around creative industries, which is its implications for developing countries.