Setting a perimeter around the creative professions. A skill based proposal

In recent years, the growing interest in the analysis of the relationships between creativity and economic development has led many researchers to develop sectoral and professional profiling that allow us to estimate the number of creative employees. Almost all these contributions, however valuable, suffer from a high subjectivity of sectoral and professional profiling. This work tries to overcome this subjectivity by proposing a more objective analysis method, anchored to the skills and creative abilities of each worker. Thanks to the use of INAPP professions database (National Institute for the Analysis of Public Policies), in fact, it is possible to identify a set of skills related to creativity. This allows to develop a multivariate indicator of creative skills that identifies a set of 49 professions with high creative potential (fourth digit of the ISTAT-CP2011 classification). The first chapter highlights some passages of the literature that allow to understand why it is important to measure creativity according to a skill-based logic. The second explains the methodology used to estimates a synthetic multivariate indicator measuring the creative potential of each profession. Chapter 3 elaborates the first results highlighting the role of the creative class in the Italian economy, according to employment estimates produced by the ISTAT-Labour Force Survey (LFS). A first descriptive analysis that clearly highlights the correlation between creativity and levels of wealth, especially from a local point of view. The last chapter focuses on what emerged from the previous ones, paving the way for next research developments.