Gross Domestic Product of Cultural and Creative Industries from an income perspective: the Brazilian case

This paper employs the Creative Occupations methodology to quantify the Culture and Creative Industries' (CCI) contribution to Brazil's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) using the income approach. Understanding the sectoral GDP is crucial for formulating sector-specific policies, recognizing the CCI sector as a catalyst for economic growth, and developing innovative methodologies to accurately measure its economic impact. Calculating the GDP of the CCI sector presents significant challenges due to methodological divergences, primarily stemming from data limitations and the sector's unique characteristics, such as multiple job holding, gig economy participation, informality, job precariousness, intermittency, and unpaid work. To address these challenges, we argue that adopting an income perspective yields more promising results for estimating the CCI GDP than traditional value-added and expenditure perspectives, which often overestimate the sector's GDP due to inadequate disaggregation in national accounting systems. We propose using the creative intensity approach to estimate creative occupations, enabling a more comprehensive and tailored sectoral definition to calculate the CCI GDP using the income approach. Our analysis draws upon a combination of national surveys encompassing formal and informal labour markets and firm-level data, as well as novel data from the Brazilian culture promotion law (Rouanet), including over 600,000 observations on expenditures related to cultural projects and incomes generated through service provision on digital platforms. This innovative methodology combines the creative intensity approach with traditional and novel data sources, aiming to provide a more accurate and comprehensive representation of the CCI sector's contribution to Brazil's GDP. The findings of this study will not only enhance the understanding of the CCI sector's economic significance but also inform policy decisions aimed at fostering the sector's growth and development.
Keywords: GDP measurement, Creative intensity, Developing countries, Income Approach