Analysts and policymakers have long complained of the dearth of internationally comparable statistics on the creative industries because it has made it impossible to benchmark the performance of different countries. In January 2014, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) adopted the Dynamic Mapping methodology for classifying some industries as ‘creative’ and others not, for the purposes of producing the UK’s Creative Industries Economic Estimates (DCMS, 2014). This methodology is based on the theoretical and empirical argument that the creative industries are “those industries that specialise in the employment of creative talent for commercial purposes” (Bakhshi, Hargreaves and Mateos–Garcia, 2013) – that is, have unusually high proportions of their workforce employed in creative occupations (‘creative intensity’). Through its use of Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes and labour force survey data, the Dynamic Mapping methodology was designed to enable the production of internationally comparable statistics (Bakhshi, Freeman and Higgs 2013)
