Scope of this report
The Creative Economy Report 2010 — Creative economy: A feasible development option is the second policy-oriented report to present the United Nations perspective on this innovative topic. The creative economy has become a topical issue of the international economic and development agenda during this decade, calling for informed policy responses in both developed and developing countries. Adequately nurtured, creativity fuels culture, infuses a human-centred development and constitutes the key ingredient for job creation, innovation and trade while contributing to social inclusion, cultural diversity and environmental sustainability.
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The first Creative Economy Report continues to attract growing interest on the part of governments, researchers and practitioners. It has helped harmonize views, stimulate more research and policy debate and refine the concept and its application. The popularity of the publication was also due to the fact that it is publicly accessible via the Internet at no cost (www.unctad.org/creative-economy and http://ssc.undp.org/creative_economy). Today, the Creative Economy Report 2008 tops a Google search on this subject. As of the end of July 2010, the report has been consulted more than 52,000 times via the Internet, and has been linked to from 1,080 websites all over the world. Indications are that the report has had a positive impact on creative industries professionals, artists and public opinion; the last two years has seen a worldwide increase in the amount of research and the number of conferences and publications on the topic of the creative economy. The Creative Economy Report 2008 has been the subject of debates by networks of academic and educational circles, has been adopted by a number of universities as a major reference for graduate-level courses, stimulating the revision of academic curricula for higher education in fields related to the arts and the creative economy.1 Moreover, an increasing number of governments, in developing and developed countries alike, are identifying the creative industries as a priority sector in their national development strategies.
The Creative Economy Report 2008 revisited: The Dutch being unnoticed, by the Research Group Arts and Economics, Utrecht School of Arts, Utrecht University, Netherlands, June 2009. C R E AT I V E E C O N O M Y R E P O R T 2 0 1 0
Scope of this repor t
This report builds upon the findings and recommendations put forward by the first Creative Economy Report 2008 — The challenge of assessing the creative economy: Towards informed policymaking, but goes a step further by deepening the analysis and bringing new insights on the impact of recent developments on the creative economy. Evidence from this report confirms an important lesson from the economic crisis, namely that the market, contrary to conventional wisdom, does not have a near-miraculous capacity to address socio-economic imbalances. Thus, policies and actions to foster development should be rooted in a balanced role for policy interventions and the market. In this context, the debate around the development dimension of the creative economy gained momentum in search of a new development model better adapted to the new realities of the contemporary society. The Creative Economy Report 2010 attempts to respond to this call by identifying trends,
strengths and weaknesses as well as challenges and opportunities to be addressed, bearing in mind that it is important to reconcile national strategies with global international processes.
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