Valeria Pica (p)

Who are the actors in the cultural and creative field today? Who is involved in the development of communities living in inner areas? These two questions can provide an interesting overview of modalities adopted as resilient ways to face the process of depopulation and loss of attractiveness that peripheral and rural areas have been suffering in the aftermath of the crisis started in 2008. Today, one can observe a countertrend where artists and cultural workers do move towards peripheral areas -leaving metropolis and big art areas - in order to find new consciousness raisers to their creative experience.
This paper aims to investigate the differences between mainstream and underground CCIs as a dual model juxtaposing cities and peripheral areas. Starting from the qualitative data the DISCE (Developing Inclusive and Sustainable Creative Economies) project gathered with interviews to key informants in L’Aquila and its surroundings, the authors will combine them with the assumptions of the German biologist Andreas Weber about the world of feeling meant as an ecosystem made of meanings and expressions lying in the relationship between man and his territory. According to Weber, the interior of living beings automatically and continuously expresses itself outwardly. It is by this understanding that he brings feeling into the centre of scientific investigation, and not only this, but also in terms of how we should conceive our world in general, including our understanding of economics. A truly successful economic model is one in which people should feel more enlivened through the exchanges in which they participate.
The paper will provide a new framework to examine the role of the CCIs to favour inclusive and sustainable growth and economic-socio-cultural (SEC) development emphasising their role in fostering local development in small-medium towns and peripheral areas.

Amir Maghssudipour (p), Annalisa Caloffi , Marco Bellandi

Traditionally, Made in Italy refers to groups of products belonging to food, fashion, furniture, and automation industries. They are distinctively export-oriented and they contribute to make positive the national balance of trade over the last ten years.
Particularly, from the supply side, Made in Italy products are mainly produced in highly specialized local productive systems, such as SMEs industrial districts, characterized by strong local communities combining cultural and productive heritage and natural environments. From the demand side, such products are increasingly exported all over the world, in countries where new middle classes, wealthy people, and cultured elites are more and more attracted by high-quality and well-designed products, as well as, products that communicate high social status and conspicuous consumption.
In this picture, even though the Italian language and heterogenous regional cultures are critical drivers of such a productive system, we know little about the relation between the latter and the economic performance of Made in Italy driven regions. In this respect, an under-developed stream of the literature suggests that specific languages and cultural assets affect the understandability of a (product-related) content for external agents. Particularly, they can influence the comprehension of symbols as well as related cultural heritage from business agents of different regions.
This work aims at offering an investigation on the complex relationship between locations where the Italian language circulate and regional cultural centres are present in foreign countries and the economic performance of Made in Italy products on a regional basis.
From the methodological point of view, we build an original dataset representing the scope of Made in Italy differentiating for Italian regions of export. After controlling for traditional variables affecting international trade, this work implements Social Network Analysis (SNA) tools to check whether and to what extent the diffusion of Italian language and culture is correlated to different levels of economic performance of Made in Italy products in different Made in Italy-driven regions.

Marina Morales (p), Miriam Marcén

In this paper, we examine whether culture plays a role in the gender division of household labor. To explore this issue, we use data on early-arrival first and second generation immigrants living in the United States. Since all these individuals have grown up under the same laws, institutions, and economic conditions, then the differences between them in the gender division of housework may be due to cultural differences. We find that the higher the culture of gender equality in the country of ancestry, the greater the equality in the division of housework. This is maintained when we consider both housework and childcare as household labor. Our work is extended by examining how culture operates and is transmitted. We study whether culture may influence by and with whom housework activities are performed and the timing of the day when this happens, which can help us to understand how culture operates in the family life of couples. Results indicate that the more culture of gender equality is associated with greater probability that individuals report performing housework when they are with their partner in the evening, which may improve family live by making housework a non-individual task. The cultural impact is also observed in the case of working days, but it is not so clear during public holidays, which can be explained by the fact that those individuals originating from less egalitarian countries work longer work hours than those from egalitarian countries. See full (draft) paper.

Timo Mitze (p), Torben Dall Schmidt

In this paper, we provide novel insights into the role of the creative class for regional growth and development. While the creative class concept has recently received considerable attention in academia and among policy makers, some unresolved issues remain. These issues include proper tests for causal effects together with insights on transmission channels and sectoral heterogeneity. We take up these issues here by investigating the contribution of the creative class and its sub-aggregates to regional economic growth in Dutch COROP regions over the period 1996 to 2012. We complement the bulk of previous contributions in the following ways: Firstly, we offer a new perspective on the issue of causality by means of instrumental variable (IV) estimation, which builds on the spatio-temporal variation of Michelin star restaurants as an instrument for the regional share of the creative class in total regional employment. We argue that the location of Michelin star restaurants may possibly be interpreted as a measure of local consumption amenities catering for specific preferences of the creative class. Secondly, we decompose the overall effect of the creative class into its three sub-aggregates (creative core, creative professionals and bohemians) to identify if there are marked differences in their contribution to the dynamics of regional income growth and labor productivity. Thirdly, we also look at sector-specific effects, which potentially relates to what has been conceptualized as creative industries. Our empirical results support prior evidence on the positive link between a region’s share of the creative class in total employment and its economic growth path. These effects particularly hold for the creative core and creative professionals and remain intact for both OLS and IV estimation. In the latter specification, the spatio-temporal variation of Michelin star restaurants turns out to be a relevant predictor of the location of the creative class across Dutch COROP regions. From a sectoral perspective, significantly positive productivity effects are mainly observed for i) financial and business services together with ii) wholesale, retail services, information and communication. In comparison, a negative link between the creative class and regional productivity growth in non-market services is found. These results point to the fact that the creative class mainly contributes to sectoral productivity growth in service industries which transform information, knowledge and competences into creative outcomes. Policy implications resulting from our estimation approach will be discussed.