The Italian Cultural and Creative Industries following the Great Recession: An exploration of the local determinants of their growth

Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs) have been variously seen as a stimulus for urban and regional development. Interestingly, in the U.K. and other EU countries, they have been one of the few sectors that have weathered the storm of the 2008 Great Recession. Starting from the curiosity that these premises arise given the paucity of studies on the Italian CCIs, we analyze the resilience of the sector in the face of that economic shock to ascertain whether this was the case also in Italy. We use data from the Aida-Bureau van Dijk database on more than 181,000 enterprises for the period 2010-2018. The number of employees and that of cultural and creative enterprises is gathered for 18 Nace Rev.2 sectors, to disentangle the contribution of each sub-sector to the growth of the industry. Information is available at the firm level, but we use it at NUTS-3 one. Using a System Generalized Method of Moments (GMM-SYS) approach, and controlling for some socioeconomic characteristics, we examine the determinants of the CCIs growth in the post-shock period, ultimately contributing to the still under-explored debate on the resilience of the sector in Italy also accounting for macro-regional and peripherality effects.