Abstract
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.
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