Giovanna Segre

Creativity, Cultural Investment and Local Development: A New Theoretical Framework for Endogenous Growth

Creativity may be seen as one, albeit crucial, instance of a deeper process of reorientation of production processes toward intangible forms of added value, a point that has been made several times in the recent literature. In industrialised countries, an increasing number of goods and services incorporate an essential, intangible added value deriving from design, aesthetics, and symbolic and identity values: the key elements of state-of-the-art competition. When competition cannot take place through costs cutting, product innovation represents the distinctive successful factor which can be obtained though a massive employment of applied creativity, craftsmanship and technological transfer. Within this framework, by taking a closer look at the organizational features of economic activities, we provide a theoretical account of the new epoch of local development processes. In particular, we focus our analysis on the emergence of new forms of horizontally-, rather than vertically-integrated clusters of economic activities, where an important role is played by the strategic complementarity between artistic production and firm production. This is the basis of a new vision of the functioning of cultural districts, where the creative value chain, starting from the cultural and artistic dimension, drives economic systems in the field of applied research and creative production. Within this context, the pure cultural artistic dimension of the district, and the creativity diffusion process which arises from it, represent the key explaining factors of culture-led economic development. Recent literature which explicitly considers the role of culture in fostering economic development, lacks a deep analysis of the causal links between all the important factors involved. All and sometimes not even all – the important factors have generally been grouped together in a “black box”, without any attempt to identify the causal relationship between them.

Smart endogenous growth: cultural capital and the creative use of skills

Purpose – Despite the growing literature aimed at explaining how cultural and artistic production feeds economic growth, the causal relationships and interplays are not investigated in depth. In the attempt of filling this gap, the purpose of this paper is to examine arts, culture, and education within the framework of the New Growth Theory. Design/methodology/approach – Starting from the analysis of how culture may be at the root of a specific engine of economic growth, the paper presents a theoretical endogenous growth model driven by the combination of the investments in human and cultural capital. Findings – The paper shows that cultural investment has a positive impact on economic growth and on the level of income provided that the economy is sufficiently “culture-intensive”, and that this effect is further magnified the more total factor productivity (TFP) is sensitive to the stock of cultural capital. Research limitations/implications – The paper figures out the possibility of a cultural poverty tr...

Place Branding and Intellectual Property

In the era of “mobility” as the overarching paradigm of social and economic organization and the fittest framework for social science enquiry (Urry 2007), it is relevant – above sectorial considerations – to look at places as being “mobilized” by tourism (Crang 2006; Ooi 2002) and at the development of tourist brands as a vehicle to identify affirmation and communication within a global context.