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Welcome How a Dose of Data Reality Can Enhance Your Region’s Competitive Positioning Fiscal Impact Analysis Creates a Win-Win for Projects and Communities Economic Gardening: Using Information to Help Your Entrepreneurs Grow Using Location Intelligence to Attract Retail to Underserved Areas Targeting a Portfolio of Clusters Quantifying the Creative Economy Economic Developer “Dinosaurs” Vs. Fast Internet Information Your Regional Knowledge Economy Strategy: Is it Succeeding? “We Have the Site, But We Need the Workforce!”  Subscribe
About Economic Development America
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Quantifying the Creative Economy (cont.)Quantifying the creative industry base ArtsMarket recently conducted an asset analysis for a cultural development planning initiative in Monterey County. The goal was to determine if critical mass existed in the creative sector to suggest promoting the arts and creative industries as one of the county’s economic development clusters. The Arts Council for Monterey County had a database of about 65 nonprofits and many individual artists, but knew its data did not fully describe the industry. So we turned to the U.S. Census drill-down reports for NAICS code 71 (arts, entertainment and recreation). By using the Census, we found 34 performing arts companies; 20 museums, gardens, zoos/aquariums and historical sites; nine promoters of performing arts; and 18 “independent artists” who are employers with payrolls. This totals a greater number of employers than in the county’s recreation segment, which includes all of the area’s famous golf courses and recreation spots. Add on the nonemployers – firms subject to federal income tax but without payroll, and the Census shows that the count for Monterey County grows by another 844 enterprises. That’s more than twice the number of similar wholesale or retail trade enterprises in the county. Even with this impressive count, we wanted to learn more. At the county level, U.S. Census data suppression may prevent reporting of certain NAICS industry groupings – for example, the subset of retail sales representing art galleries, NAICS 45392. Here’s where turning to a data provider such as Micro IMPLAN can boost analysis. IMPLAN draws its information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Covered Employment and Wages program, in which data are collected monthly by state agencies. It also includes statistics on self-employment drawn from the Bureau of Economic Analysis Regional Economic Information System (REIS). These are critical data in a field where freelancers and individual artists comprise a giant, often vastly underreported share of the industry activity. It is also critical in capturing the typically underrepresented fields of art dealers, media artists and even furniture designers, all part of the arts industry. IMPLAN showed that Monterey County’s creative industry asset base was even larger than Census data indicated.We now could see a count of 7,569 workers within these same NAICS classifications. By adding the county’s jobs in the remaining industries identified in the LAEDC report above, this number grew to 9,743 workers, representing over 4 percent of the current employment base within the county. Comparing these figures with the other major industries within the county revealed that there are more creative industry jobs in Monterey County than there are jobs in residential construction or fruit farming, and nearly as many as in the county’s healthcare industry. If the definition of creative industries includes book publishing (often but not universally included), then employment jumps to nearly 11,000, making the creative industries second only to agriculture as an employment base within the county. IMPLAN data made it possible to determine that the creative industries are also a major economic force in Monterey County, currently driving $557 million in output annually, not including book publishing. This is greater than the industry output of hotels and motels ($454 million), wineries ($386 million) or hospitals ($296 million.) The data illustrated the breadth of the creative industries as an economic sector. In the past few years, Monterey County has identified wellness, building and tourism as sectors to focus on, because of their current significance and their ability to grow. Based on current employment and industry output numbers, the creative industries may be even better positioned as an economic development strategy.
The Monterey exercise shows the importance of digging deep to gain a real understanding of the creative industry asset base.With industry size and economic output information in hand,Monterey used surveys and public meetings to gain further details about the diverse nature of the industry, and to focus on strategies to help it grow. A portfolio of initiatives ranging from microenterprise loans to training in business planning for artists and artisans to creativity-tourism partnerships quickly emerged. A century ago, Monterey County was a magnet for the great wave of American impressionist painters who captured its images on canvases that today are in museum collections around the world. Thanks to data that show the size and nature of its creative asset base, Monterey County is once again readying itself for an explosion in creativity.
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