The world is shifting from an age of information to an age of creativity and imagination – ideas, knowledge, skills, and the ability to seize new opportunities.
45% of the jobs in future will change. By 2030, there will be shortage of 85 million jobs in the creative industries that is currently valued at $2.5 trillion and will expand to $8.5 trillion by 2030 – the speakers said in the ongoing World Government Summit.
The term creative industries is a blend of oldest cultural and modern digital technologies – from books, theater, dance, film, and visual arts to design, fashion, performing arts, publishing, computer services, and television.
Since it has strong cultural roots, creative industries are dubbed as cultural and creative industries (CCI). It is a subset of creative economy that deals with the interface of between economy, culture, technology, and social aspects.
A joint study by CISAC and UNESCO in December 2015 estimated that the revenues of CCI ($2,250bn) exceed those of telecom services ($1,570bn) and surpass India’s GDP ($1,900bn). Television ($477bn), visual arts ($391bn), and newspapers and magazines ($354bn) were the top-3 earners.
In addition, with 29.5 million jobs worldwide – CCI was employing about 1% of the world‘s active population by 2015. Visual arts (6.73mn), books (3.67mn), and music (3.98mn) were the top three employers.
Driven by large population and housing the global CCI leaders such as Tencent, CCTV, and Yomiuri Shimbun – Asia Pacific (APAC) generated 33% of global revenues ($743bn) and provided 12.7 million jobs (43% of CCI jobs worldwide).
According to the second UNCTAD Creative Economy Outlook and Country Profile report 2018 – the size of global market for creative good was expanded substantially from $208 billion in 2002 to $509 billion in 2015.
Design – interior design, fashion articles, jewelry, glassware, toys, and architecture materials – continues to be the largest subgroup in the global market of creative industries. The global exports of design goods have almost tripled from $118 billion in 2002 to$318 billion in 2015.
In Visual Arts, value inherently lies in the exclusivity and originality of an artwork. They comprise antiques, paintings, sculpture, photography as well as carvings, engravings, and ornaments. Visual Arts together with Art Crafts has the 2nd largest 45% share in creative goods exports.
Creative economy is now witnessing a new trend – from production of creative goods to the delivery of creative services such as charges for use of intellectual property and licenses for the use of outcomes of R&D, to reproduce and/or redistribute computer softwares and audio visual and related products etc. This aligns with a global shift towards services as industrial and agricultural outputs are declining worldwide.
UNCTAD report concludes that the creative economy can catalyze change, in which, trade in creative goods and services is a powerful, growing economic force – as its contribution to GDP and share of global trade is only likely to increase because of its ability to intersect with the digital and sharing economy and e-commerce.
China is leading the global creative economy. It is the world’s largest exporter of creative goods and is also expanding its presence in the global creative services. In 2015, Chinese creative goods exports ($168.5bn) were four times than that of the United States. It also had the world’s highest creative trade surplus of $154 billion.
Nearly 10 of the top-50 Chinese brands overseas are software and gaming. TikTok, a Chinese media app for creating and sharing short videos, is going popular around the world. Its advertising can be seen anywhere in London.
Creative jobs are future-proof jobs with 87% of those are at low or no risk of automation. There are more than 2 million jobs in UK creative industries, an increase of 28.6% since 2011. It added some 80,000 creative jobs in UK in 2017.
Of the creative workers in UK creative industries – 35% are self-employed, while freelancers make a sizeable portion of self-employed workforce in UK creative industries. The Gross Value Added (GVA) of the UK creative industries was £101.1 billion – £11.5 million per hour.
The UK creative industries exported £27 billion of services in 2016 – IT Software and Games being the largest, £13 billion. UK exports of creative services account for 11% of all UK services exports.
There are individual contributors to creative economies as well. Re: Creation’s economic research on America’s New Creative Economy found that in 2017, nearly 17 million Americans earned $6.8 billion by posting their personal creations on 9 social media platforms.
YouTube ($4.0bn) was by far the largest social media platform for the US creators’ earnings – a 21.1% increase as compared to 2016’s earnings. The number of US creators on YouTube was also increased by 81.4% to nearly 2.2 million in 2017.
With $1.3 billion, Etsy was the second-largest social media earnings platform for the US creators. Instagram posted the highest growth (49.5%) in the US creators’ earnings in 2017, followed by Twitch (30.0%).