Industry-based methodological approaches to the measurement of Creative Industries: a theoretical and empirical account

The rising interest in the creative economy has encouraged several authors both in the political and academic spheres to focus on creative industries and cultural activities and assess their effects on regional and national development. The issue of measurement has, however, limited the analysis considerably. Despite progress at the theoretical and empirical levels, there is a generalized lack of clear definitions and estimations as to what represents cultural activities and creative industries. This paper critically reviews the growing corpus of literature on approaches to the measurement of creative industries. Moreover, it presents a detailed mapping of the creative sectors and estimates the relative weight of creative industries according to relevant industry-based methodologies, using a unique dataset (Quadros de Pessoal, Portugal), which includes over 3 million workers, and that permits an accurate comparative analysis of the different methodologies under study. The choice of approach when measuring creative industries is relevant in estimating the importance of such industries. Indeed, depending on the approach used, the importance of creative industries in Portugal differs, ranging from 2.5% (DCMS Model) to 4.6% (WIPO copyright model). In order to overcome the limitations of existing methodologies, we proposed a new industry-based approach focusing on core creative industries. According to the proposed methodology, core creative industries represent 3.5% of Portuguese employment, in which ‘Software publishing’ and ‘Computer/IT consultancy’ (1.0%), ‘Publishing’ (1.0%), and ‘Advertising and Marketing’ (0.4%) are the most relevant sub-segments.