First SMARTER Conference on Smart Specialisation and Territorial Development

28-30 September 2016, Seville Spain

Smart specialisation, culture, creativity and

tourism in Italian convergence regions

Luciana Lazzeretti and Niccolò Innocenti

Department of Economics and Management

University of Florence

THE AIM OF THE WORK

This paper investigates whether cultural and creative industries

may be considered a driving force also for the less developed regions

in the South of Italy (the convergence regions) using a broad

approach in their definition (Lazzeretti and Capone 2015), which

includes also the tourist filiére.

In the present work we aim to answer the following questions:

What is the position of Italian convergence regions in creative and

tourist industries?

What is the role and impact of related variety and the clustering of

creative and tourist industries on employment growth in less

developed Italian provinces?

STRUCTURE OF THE PRESENTATION

Theoretical Background

• Smart Specialisation and Culture

• Cultural and Creative Industries definition

Research design

• Source of data

• Methods

• Unit of analysis

Results

• Concentration of CCIs

• Concentration of Tourism activity

• The determinants of employment growth

Concluding remarks

Work in progress

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

SMART SPECIALISATION AND CULTURE

The concept of Smart Specialisation (SS) (Foray 2009; McCann

and Ortega Argiles 2015; Foray 2015), ”combines industrial,

educational and innovation policies to suggest that countries or

regions identify and select a limited number of priority areas for

knowledge-based investments, focusing on their strengths and

comparative advantages” (OECD).

The importance of Culture as one of the area to be supported.

It has also been widely recognized that cultural and creative

industries can make an important contribution to Europe in order

to recover from the economic crisis (Bakhshi et al. 2008; Pratt

and Hutton 2013) and to foster innovation, thus contributing to

implementing strategies of Smart Specialisation (S3)

DEFINITION OF THE CCIS

The definition of creative industries has been long a fuzzy concept, until the contribution of the UK DCMS (2001-2013), which has become the standard of international-level comparison (UNESCO, 2013)

Critics about which industries are to be considered creative or not and which must be included in any analysis remain (Cunningham, 2013; Cunningham & Higgs, 2008; Markusen, Wassall, De Natale, & Cohen, 2008).

In this context, Bakhshi et al. (2013) have recently criticized the original DCMS approach (2001), underlining that even if the DCMS’s taxonomy has become a de facto world standard, it does not fully capture the reality of the phenomenon.

The DCMS (2013) itself has taken a new approach along the same lines, focusing on the idea of ‘creative intensity’ and using the proportion of people doing creative jobs within each industry to suggest which industries should be included

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

CULTURAL AND CREATIVE INDUSTRIES

Source: Authors’ elaboration from Green paper (EC 2010).

RESEARCH DESIGN

Source of Data:

The sources of main data is ISTAT census Industry and services

(2011).

The ISTAT data are about the number of employees at Provincial

level (for the 26 provinces of the Italian convergence regions) and

disaggregated at 3-digit level, following the ateco (2007)

classification.

Methods:

Location Quotient (LQ), which indicates the concentration of

workers in the sector of interest, identifying what are the areas with a

higher concentration than the national average.

CULTURAL AND CREATIVE INDUSTRIES

Advertising

73.1 Advertising

Motion picture, video and tv

59.1 Motion picture, video and television program activities

Architecture

71.1 Architectural activities

Photography

74.2 Photographic activities

Arts and entertainment

90.0 Arts and entertainment activities

Programming and broadcasting activities - tv and radio

60.1 Radio broadcasting

60.2 Television programming and broadcasting activities

Computer programming

62.0 Computer programming, consultancy and related

activities

Publishing

58.1 Publishing of books, periodicals and other publishing

activities

58.2 Software publishing

Design activities

74.1 Specialized design activities

Sound recording and music

59.2 Sound recording & music publishing activities

Source: Authors’ elaborations from DCMS (2013).

CONCENTRATION OF CULTURAL AND CREATIVE

WORKERS

Source: Authors’ elaboration from ISTAT 2011

CONCENTRATION OF CULTURAL AND CREATIVE

WORKERS II

• In the presented map is possible to see that no province has a

value of employees in creative industries higher than the

national average.

• Only three provinces have values higher than 0.9, namely

Palermo, Matera and Benevento. Most of the other provinces

have values that vary between 0.7 and 0.9, while the lowest

levels (slightly below 0.6) can be found in the provinces of

Crotone, Caserta and Trapani.

• These results indicate a low specialization in cultural and

creative industries in the considered regions, with values very

far from the national hotspots (Milan, Rome etc.)

TOURISM FILIERE

Accommodation

55.1 Hotels and similar accommodation

55.2 Holiday and other short-stay accommodation

55.3 Camping grounds, recreational vehicle parks and

trailer parks

55.9 Other accommodation

Libraries, archives, museums and cultural activities

91.01 Library and archives activities

91.02 Museums activities

91.03 Operation of historical sites and buildings and

similar visitor attractions

91.04 Botanical and zoological gardens and nature

reserves activities

Restaurant and food/beverage service activities

56.1 Restaurants and mobile food service activities

56.2 Event catering and other food service activities

56.3 Beverage serving activities

Sports activities and amusement and recreation activities

93.1 Sports activities

93.2 Amusement and recreation activities

Creative, arts and entertainment activities

90.01 Performing arts

90.02 Support activities to performing arts

90.03 Artistic creation

90.04 Operation of arts facilities

Travel agencies and tour operators

79.1 Travel agency and tour operator

79.9 Other reservation service and related activities

Source: Our elaboration from EC (2003), Lazzeretti and Capone 2015 .

CONCENTRATION OF TOURIST WORKERS

Source: Authors’ elaboration from ISTAT 2011

CONCENTRATION OF TOURIST WORKERS II

• We can clearly see how, contrary to the results of the previous

figure, there are many provinces with values higher than the

national average.

• Reaching in some cases values higher than 1.3, such as for the

provinces of Vibo Valentia, Trapani and Brindisi. Among the 26

provinces considered, only six have a LQ value lower than 1

and only three (Caserta, Bari and Caltanissetta) reach values

under 0.9.

• Another observation concerns the environmental characteristics

of the provinces. Those with the highest values have many

kilometers of coastline and this fact suggests that the main

component of tourist attractiveness may be the seaside summer

activities.

A COMPARISON OF THE PROVINCES

Source: Authors’ elaboration from ISTAT 2011

A COMPARISON OF THE PROVINCES II

• In this graph, the considerations that we have already made in

the previous two sections are even more evident.

• No province is located in the right quadrant and almost all

the provinces are positioned in the quadrant at the top left,

showing again a significant weakness in the creative

industries and a relative strength in the tourist areas with

real points of excellence in line with the main Italian tourist

destinations.

• The sea tourism, which is integrated with other entertainment

activities and the experience economy, seems to be the most

important environmental and economic resource to be

enhanced. In fact, the main areas of attraction of the

considered provinces are mainly located in coastal areas.

THE DETERMINANTS OF EMPLOYMENT

GROWTH AND THE RELATED VARIETY

The concept of relatedness may be defined as a highly significant

element for SS, as it is useful to derive some policy implications

and could be used in a spatial perspective, suggesting a

specialized diversification related to the existing and driving

technologies of the region (Boschma 2014; McCann and Ortega-

Argilés 2015)

According to the related variety approach (Frenken et al. 2007),

related variety defines shared competences between different

sectors, which are, in this view, related to each other but not too

much (Boschma and Iammarino 2009).

Here an econometric model is used to measure the impact of

related variety and concentration of creative and tourism

industries on employment growth.

RESULTS

Model 1 Model 2

Variables Emp. Grow 2001-11 Emp. Grow. 2001-11

Coeff Std Err Coeff Std Err

Variety 0.0320 0.0361

Rel. Var. 0.1285* 0.0695

Unrel. Var -0.0239 0.0377

LQ Creat. -0.4843** 0.1646 -0.4084* 0.1689

LQ Tur. -0.0066 0.0368 -0.0541 0.0502

Human Cap. 3.1391 1.8387 2.8597* 1.5613

Patent 0.0031 0.0152 0.0019 0.0124

Constant 0.1067 0.2232 0.0887 0.1936

R-Squared 0.401 0.511

N. of Cases 26 26

Significant at: *p<0.1, ** p<0.01, *** p<0.001.

Source: Authors’ elaboration.

• The variables are computed for the initial year 2001 for all the 26 provinces of the

convergence regions.

• The dependent variable Employment growth is given by the growth rate of

employment between 2001 and 2011 (ISTAT 2001, 2011).

RESULTS II

• The results show a significant and positive effect of the related

variety on employment growth underlying how the presence in a

province of a set of industries operating in related fields could be

an important driver for employment growth, even in a period

of recession.

• No significance is found among Lq of tourism workers and

employment growth.

• Lq of Creative workers shows significant results with a

negative sign. Having a higher level of creative workers in a

province in the 2001 does not help the employment growth in

the following decade, which grows less in those provinces

characterized by a higher concentrations of creative workers.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Creative industries per sé are not able to promote the growth of

less developed areas.

Is important to use an enlarged approach to really capture the

dynamics and interactions of the creative industries.

There is an important contribution of the related variety to the

employment growth of the area.

Becomes fundamental to integrate creative and tourism sectors

into other multi-sectoral activities in order to benefit from the

effects of cross-fertilization and transversality and from possible

policies of SS so as to achieve positive results in terms of

employment growth.

WORK IN PROGRESS

Additional studies are developing analyzing the role of related industries for the creative industries.

Using a methodology developed by Hidalgo (2007) an industry space is constructed revealing the relatedness among creative sectors and all the other sectors.

Showing how the creative sectors have a huge number of high level of relatedness with other industries.

In the following graph the dimension of the node represent the number of employees of the industrial category and the thickness of the line the level of relatedness among the two considered categories.

In the graph are presented only the relations with a relatedness level of 0,5 or higher.

RELATEDNESS AMONG CREATIVE INDUSTRIES

Source: Elaboration from ISTAT 2011, Innocenti and Lazzeretti 2016.

CREATIVE INDUSTIRES AND THE WIDER

ECONOMY

Source: Elaboration from ISTAT 2011, Innocenti and Lazzeretti 2016.

CREATIVE INDUSTIRES AND THE WIDER

ECONOMY

The first figure presented show the relatedness among creative

industries.

The second one present the relatedness of creative industries and

non creative sectors, showing how there are strong connections

among creative industries and many non creative industries.

(Design with Textile industries; Advertising with Commerce;

Architecture with Constructions etc.)

Reinforcing the ideas that the CCI’s should not be analyzed as

isolated and able to promote the growth and development of the

area on their own, but require the presence of other related

sectors that allow to generate synergies and exchanges of

knowledge and ideas.