Creative industries around the world

This chapter asks what distinctive variations on creative industries concepts and claims can be seen around the world, and what implications this may have for a comparative research agenda. There is, as we have seen, major country-by-country comparative research on creative industries performance, but this tends to be narrowly financial in nature. Cunningham and Swift’s granular attention to political, social, cultural and economic dynamics of creative industries policy in a series of compact country case studies raises fundamental questions about how flexible creative industries policy settings can be, and what might be the irreducible elements that differentiate such policy from its near neighbours. The chapter’s emphasis on the global South partially rebalances the book’s de facto global North bias.