„The contribution of culture to our national GDP is seven times higher than that of a car industry”, this is a surprising outcome of a French study undertaken as a part of a worldwide research on the economic impact of culture and creation on a worldwide economic growth. When Francois Hollande decided to cancel the important Paris exhibition Monumenta due to the savings at the beginning of his presidential mandate, his decision raised a huge wave of displeasure and criticism and thus initiated a serious study on the impact of culture on the country´s economy. The results published two years later took breath away even from the most obstinate critics.
Simultaneously, based on the UNESCO initiative, Ernst and Young conducted a study focused on the same topic on the international scale and in December 2015 published the results. According to this study, the industry, officially called ICC – Industry of Culture and Creation, represents a turnover of $2.250 billion, which is for example more than a worldwide turnover of telecommunication technologies.
The positive outcome therefore is that culture and art creation undoubtedly belong among the non-negligible driving forces of the world economy. Further interesting results show that for example in Europe, the USA, and Japan the industry employs more people than a car industry. So, culture is not only good for our amusement and entertainment as many politicians thought, but it is crucial for a worldwide economy. Economic analysts and advisors to various governments immediately provided proposals of major positive changes regarding the support of culture of every specific country. Investments into culture also became one of the strategies to solve crises in many European countries. For example Iceland, the country hit by the crisis among the first in Europe, decided to build a music hall as soon as possible, to help tackling its unemployment crisis in a construction industry as well as support their national pride and positive future expectations. China, till that time really behind in this industry, made culture its new strategic sector in 2009. Within five years, China´s investments into culture raised by 200%. Today, culture represents almost 4% of GDP of Argentina. In Bangkok, the total number of companies operating in the culture industry increased to twenty thousand (dollars?) within ten years. Countries like Indonesia and Brazil, which considered their culture strategy a second-rate issue, are making massive investments in culture these days. Italy has recently decided to increase its culture industry budget by one billion Euros, targeted on the war against terrorism too. “They want to terrorise us, we will reply with culture,” declared Matteo Renzi. We would appreciate France doing the same thing.
As a surprise came the fact that Asia currently shares the highest part of culture industry income, i.e. 34% of a worldwide profit, employs in the industry directly or indirectly 40% of the citizens, and has the highest percentage of culture consumers. Asia is immediately followed by Europe with 32% of culture income and 25% of employees, and then comes North America (28% and 15%). The USA and Canada, traditional leaders in the industry, have struggled with a lack of public subsidies since the 2008 financial crisis, despite the fact they are still on top in art creation, quality, and volume of university art education as well as the number of cultural institutions and the scale of culture events.
The top five cities leaderboard in the area of art is led by New York, followed by London, Paris, San Francisco, and surprisingly Singapore! Paris, profiting from the biggest and best preserved potential of cultural heritage, i.e. historic architecture, paintings and general artistic creation from the past centuries, nowadays profits also from the research of high technologies in the area of creation. Paradoxically though, it suffers from the lack of the state support of private investors.
It is interesting that the worldwide number one among the ten industry sectors (TV, visual art, music, print and publishing, commercial, books and libraries, live shows, video games, movies, and radio) is a revenue generated by the sector of visual art! Despite the fact that digitalisation is spreading rapidly and companies like Google, Apple, and Amazon are creating another major platform for culture. And it is in particular the Internet that enabled a quick and efficient promotion of European and American culture in Asia, Africa, India etc. However, negative issues are brought along too, in the form of a mass cultural hegemony, commercialism and globalisation, against which the countries with a strong cultural tradition are trying to fight.
With the current generally high unemployment, a very positive psychological impact is created by a prevailing interest in culture sector jobs. This is visible not only in developing countries. So, the added value of culture for economic growth is evident. Motivation to work in a cultural environment is higher than in any other sector, covers all age categories, and in comparison to other industries it is more diverse financially.
Psychologists point out another positive fact, saying that culture carries other values besides the economic ones too. It emancipates, stimulates, enriches, brings together, creates positive emotions, strengthens identity, and also represents a natural vector for good functioning of every democracy.
By: Ing. Arch. Iva Drebitko
Photo: author´s archive