Employment and intangible spending in the UK's creative industries - A view from the micro data

Abstract

The UK's creative industries and creative workforce grew faster than the rest of the economy between 1997 and 2008. This article uses micro data to explore the changing patterns of creative employment in the UK's creative industries. The categories of creative employment showing the strongest growth over this period were Advertising and Software ' Computing. It is also shown that the creative industries exhibiting the highest proportions of creative employment are those with the highest proportions of sector- or skill-specific employment. The article then continues to find a broad association between the proportion of creative employment in an industry and the level of spending on intangibles. These intangibles predominately consist of knowledge capital, hence positing a link between an expert creative workforce and indicators of innovation.