Comparative Advantage and Intellectual Property Rights: Some Evidences from Creative Industries in Bhutan, China and Egypt

Creative industries (CI) “are the cycles of creation, production and distribution of goods and services that use creativity and intellectual capital as primary inputs” (UNCTAD 2010). The notion that intellectual capital can be organized as a primary factor of production whereby various industries can be deemed ‘creative’ does not go without inviting academic scrutiny (Oakley 2004; Elliot 2007). In the UK where the idea conceived, as Labour government was voted out of the office and general business environment changed, ‘creative industries’ have lost much of its currency as an industrial policy tool. With the onset of the worst recession in decades, many cultural organizations and creative businesses which have only recently gone through a period of boom are found to be facing large budget cut and the withdrawal of supports by the government. Elsewhere in the world, the contrast could not be more different. In the dynamic industries such as new media, game and performing arts, Germany is rising fast to challenge the traditional US leadership. In the developing world the concept is now increasingly taken up by the government to encourage creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation. China, for example, instituted first official Cultural and Creative Industries Development Plan to ‘kick start’ a nation-wide campaign, and began strategic reorganization of state owned enterprises (SOEs) in publishing and media, to be followed by capital market listing, Chinese firm such as Crystal CG has quietly entered the world stage of creative business after its debut in the grand opening of the Beijing Olympics. In India, increasing level of specialization has made India the world’s largest exporter of handmade paper with 23 % of the world’s export market share. In spite of major instability, Afghanistan has become the 11th largest carpet exporter in the world with a 2 % of global share in export. While creativity is and has always been a key force behind human progress, it can be argued that the concept of creative ‘industries’ offers a new lens through which one can examine and capture ‘kaleidoscopic’ combination and recombination of human ingenuity and organization. In the context of development, trade in creative goods such as handicrafts provides the least developed countries (LDC) with income generation and diversification opportunities from traditional agriculture. Trading a country’s authentic material culture embodied in the form of traditional handicraft also gives voice to the nations (Barrowclough and Kozul-Wright 2007; Schultz and Van Gelder 2008) and has a great potential to transform skills into opportunity driven entrepreneurship and self empowerments (UNIDO 2011). Based on recently released international trade data provided by UNCTAD’s creative economy programme, this paper presents some preliminary findings of an ongoing study which aims to empirically assess, though at this stage very partially and limited, the relationships between revealed comparative advantage (RCA) and intellectual property rights (IPRs). While there is no shortage of academic literatures which pointed out the importance of IPRs to creative industries (Schultz and Van Gelder 2008), there remains few sector based, large scale, cross national study which investigates the relationship between RCA and IPR. While the research is ongoing to explore wider implication of IPRs for development, the focus of this paper is to present the result of empirical assessment on creative economy hence the focus is leaned towards understanding the overall performance of creative industries in the world and related comparative advantage of CI and its sub-groupings. Specifically, the paper looks at (1) trade dependency ratio in relation to CI, (2) revealed comparative advantage across 24 CI sub-groups and top performer, (3) local development issues pertaining to CI based interventions aiming at enhancing competitiveness. The analysis is drawn from a 206 x 206 country to country trade flow matrix organized by 24 creative industries sub-groups to assess sectoral pattern of trade. The dataset for trade dependency ratio uses a smaller sample of 103 countries which reported on both trade in goods and services. The research has not been able to provided evidences on the linkage between RCA and IPR which would only be available with more time and efforts finding a suitable concordance between WIPO based statistics measure and UNCTAD’s ISTC/HS systems. Future directions are discussed as to how to develop from this paper for the ongoing research and the difficulty to integrate WIPO based IPR statistics with UNCTAD’s classification on creative industries6. The structure of this paper is as follows. The first part of the paper presents an overview of creative economy in terms of trade dependency and RCA. The second part of this paper looks at the RCA and sectoral pattern of CI trade in the cases of Bhutan, Egypt and China. The third part of this paper reflects on the findings from the field missions and discusses the potential of CI for development. The final part of this paper outlines further steps for the future research

Visual Artists Between Cultural Demand and Economic Subsistence. Empirical Findings From Berlin.

This paper will show the increasing convergence between cultural and economic discourses. On the one hand, art activities can be seen in an interdependent relationship between cultural industries and knowledge economy. On the other hand, there are regional economic effects of art and culture. Furthermore the actors play, as pioneers, a key role in the occupying of urban space to regenerate de-industrialised and seedy places. I take up the lifestyle concept with the definition of a creative class and a creative milieu. The concepts of the creative city facilitate access into the correlations between culture and the development of a city, by which creative locations become elicit. Questions, such as what are the special attributes of performing artists, what forms the basis of creative potential and what characteristics make creative areas in cities identifiable, will be broached. The performed survey focused on conditions on the real estate market, on the social and professional situation of artists and on market integration. This investigation should offer some information to Berlin’s policy makers to promote artists in their contribution to support the local creative scene, build local economies, develop communities and social cohesion, and as general image building.

Capturing the dynamics of co-production and collaboration in the digital economy

In the digital economy, the creative industries revolve around dynamic, innovative and often unorthodox collaborations, whereby numerous large, small and micro-businesses come together for the duration of a project, then disband and form new partnerships for the next project. Research designs must therefore address multiple contexts and levels presenting an analytical challenge to researchers. In this project we extend work that investigates the significance of emergence in theorising entrepreneurship into an exploration of how to articulate the creation and flow of value and effective ontology in a creative landscape

An investigation of key growth industry sectors in Wales using Multi-Sectoral Qualitative Analysis

This paper examines the problem of key sector identification in regional economies. Whilst the paper questions the desirability of policy focusing on the promotion of key sectors, it suggests that tools are generally underdeveloped to identify these sectors. The paper suggests that multi-sectoral qualitative analysis provides one means of forming conclusions on sector potentials.

China media research: The trans-disciplinary challenge

This paper addresses the permeability of the field of China media research, its openness to new ideas; it argues that we need to adopt a wide angle view on research opportunities. Expansion of China’s media during the past decade has opened up possibilities for broadening of the field. The discussion first identifies boundary tensions as the field responds to transdisciplinary knowledge; in the second part the paper addresses challenges faced by Chinese researchers or visiting scholars in ‘Western’ media environments. Finally the paper addresses what a wide angle perspective might include

Creativity and the experts: New Labour, think tanks, and the policy process

This article explores the role of expertise in public debate on creative industries policy in the United Kingdom. The first section gives an overview of the emergence of expertise in government and the rise of think tanks, locating this within a wider sociology of the intellectuals. It discusses the development of New Labour expertise in response to that of Thatcherite Conservatism in the battle to dominate public policy agendas. The second section illustrates the growth of the New Labour "policy generation" and the emergence of a cohort of experts in the fields of media, communications, and culture and discusses routes taken by them into government. The final section, based on interviews, discusses the power plays behind New Labour policy making in the creative industries field. It considers the impact of ministerial changes on the policy process, illustrates how interdepartmental rivalries introduce complexity and demonstrates how civil service expertise may be mobilised to neutralise that of outside experts. The conclusion addresses the implications of this analysis

Managing Diversity and Glass Ceiling Initiatives as National Economic Imperatives

Glass Ceiling ReportGlassCeilingBackground5ManagingDiversity.pdf: 11584 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Cultural capital of IT developers in Ukraine: exploratory case study

Article focuses on the analysis of approaches to studying cultural capital of IT developers. Exploratory case study refers to the IT developers’ activity and focuses the cultural capital (CC) of the Ukrainian IT sector. Theoretical foundation of the study is based on the cultural capital theory referring to the value of social relations and networks. Research results demonstrate that Ukrainian IT developers accumulate CC through education: individual, in family, at school and with peers. Cultural capital could be transformed into other forms of capital: economic and social ones