Creative Clusters and Creative Multipliers: Evidence from UK Cities

Abstract

Economic geographers have paid much attention to the cultural and creative industries, both for their propensity to cluster in urban settings, and their potential to drive urban economic development. However, evidence on the latter is surprisingly sparse. In this article, we explore the long-term, causal impacts of the cultural and creative industries on surrounding urban economies. Adapting Moretti’s local multipliers framework, we build a new twenty-year panel of UK cities, using historical instruments to identify causal effects of creative activity on noncreative firms and employment. We find that each creative job generates at least 1.9 nontradable jobs between 1998 and 2018. Prior to 2007, these effects seem more rooted in creative services employees’ local spending than visitors to creative amenities. Given the low numbers of creative jobs in most cities, the overall impact of the creative multiplier is small. On average, the creative sector is responsible for over 16 percent of nontradable job growth in our sample, though impacts will be larger in bigger clusters. We do not find the same effects for workplaces, and we find no causal evidence for spillovers from creative activity to other tradable sectors. In turn, this implies that creative city policies will have partial, uneven local economic impacts. Given extensive urban clusters of creative activity in many countries, our results hold value beyond the UK setting.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00130095.2022.2094237
Divisions: College of Business and Social Sciences > Aston Business School > Economics, Finance & Entrepreneurship
College of Business and Social Sciences > Aston Business School > Centre for Personal Financial Wellbeing
Additional Information: © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group, on behalf of Clark University This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.orglicenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Uncontrolled Keywords: Economics and Econometrics,Geography, Planning and Development,creative industries,local multipliers,cities,local economic development
Publication ISSN: 1944-8287
Last Modified: 07 Oct 2024 07:36
Date Deposited: 17 Jun 2022 14:45
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: https://www.tan ... 95.2022.2094237 (Publisher URL)
http://10.31235/osf.io/xs8zg (Author URL)
http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2022-07-28
Published Online Date: 2022-07-28
Accepted Date: 2022-05-09
Authors: Gutierrez Posada, Diana
Kitsos, Tasos (ORCID Profile 0000-0002-5338-2714)
Nathan, Max
Nuccio, Massimiliano

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