Creative Industries Mapping via the Creative-Intensity Perspective: The Case of Brazil

This chapter adapts the creative‐intensity approach to map Brazil’s creative industries in a way that reflects the country’s distinctive labour market and cultural heterogeneity. Building on Bakhshi, Freeman and Higgs’ (2013) method—which defines industries by the share of creative occupations—we develop a Brazil-specific framework that accounts for high levels of informality and self-employment often overlooked by models derived from advanced economies (e.g., DCMS). Using PNAD microdata to capture both formal and informal work, we align Brazil’s occupational taxonomy (CBO-2002) with international standards (SOC-2000) and set a conservative creative-intensity threshold of 20% to identify creative industries. The resulting map distinguishes 16 industry categories, spanning heritage crafts and fashion to IT services and digital media. We estimate that, by late 2023, approximately 7.7 million people worked in Brazil’s creative economy, with informality comprising about 38% of this workforce. These findings underline the centrality of informal labour to sectoral dynamism and the risks of relying solely on formal employment datasets (e.g., RAIS) for policy design. We discuss methodological choices (classification alignment, threshold selection) and their implications, and we propose policy directions to strengthen capabilities, rights, and productivity across both formal and informal segments. The chapter provides an empirically grounded, transferable template for mapping creative economies in middle-income contexts.