The nexus between the cultural and creative industries and the Sustainable Development Goals: a network perspective

ABSTRACT

Scholars and policymakers have widely claimed that the cultural and creative industries (CCIs) provide positive knowledge externalities that can help address sustainable development challenges, yet questions remain about the pathways through which this occurs. In this study, we hypothesise that several features of knowledge networks in the CCIs relate to a location’s sustainable development outcomes. We use data of ownership networks between 22,455 cultural heritage-related firms across 292 cities in China to empirically test our hypotheses. We find that the density of the CCI network has a positive relation with a city’s performance in terms of several Sustainable Development Goal measures. Moreover, the scale of local CCIs has an inverted ‘U’-shaped relationship with a city’s sustainability performance. Finally, a city’s degree of trans-local ties has an inverted ‘U’-shaped relation with a city’s sustainability performance.

KEYWORDS:

• cultural and creative industries
• cultural heritage
• Sustainable Development Goals
• network analysis

JEL:

• D85, Q01, R11, Z1

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper is based on a chapter of Yang Gao’s doctoral dissertation at HEC Montréal. We thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We used the following three-digit codes from the Industrial Classification for National Economic Activities (GB/T4754-2017): 231-233, 241-243, 245, 246, 267, 347, 393, 395, 514, 524, 632, 633, 642, 712, 725, 728, 735, 749, 785, 786, 806, 861, 862, 871-877, 881-887, 889, 901-903, 905 and 909.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 42520171499].