Italian cultural and creative industries following the Great Recession: an exploration of the local determinants of growth

Abstract

The cultural and creative industries (CCIs) have variously been seen as a stimulus for urban and regional development. They were also one of the few sectors in the UK and European Union countries to weather the storm of the 2008 Great Recession. Starting from the curiosity aroused by these premises, and given the paucity of studies on Italian CCIs, we analyse the growth trend of the sector following the economic shock of the Great Recession to ascertain whether this trend also held for Italy. We use data from the Aida-Bureau van Dijk database on more than 181,000 enterprises for the period 2010–18. Information on the number of employees from the cultural and creative enterprises is collected for 18 NACE Rev. 2 sectors, with the aim of disentangling the contribution of each subsector to the growth of the industry. While information is available at the firm level, we use NUTS-3-level information. Using a system generalised method of moments (GMM-SYS) approach, and controlling for some socio-economic characteristics, we examine the determinants of the growth of CCIs in the post-shock period, ultimately contributing to the underexplored debate on the resilience of the sector in Italy and accounting for its macro-regional and peripherality effects.