Measuring creative and cultural industries: the statistics job from taxonomies to composite indices

The present chapter recognize the challenging issue in measuring creative economy by means of cultural and creative industries (CCIs). In doing so, it is essential to develop a more comprehensive and systematic understanding of CCIs within a taxonomies background with mobile definitional boundaries. A key step towards this direction is providing robust evidence about CCIs' definitions and measurement, by using available statistical information in relation to the European creative economy. Different sources were exploited to collect informa¬tion on CCIs at the Country level. Some data are also present at regional (NUTS2) and province (NUTS3) level. At city level is difficult to have finer grain observations and there is a lack of proper monitoring tools in this spatial unit of analysis. A scholar debate on composite indices is articulated as well but new challenges rise up as the need for CCIs impact metrics to become more and more relevant in terms of re-thinking inclusive and sustainable growth for the creative economy. Some composite indices have been already built and discussed but, given the complexity of cultural production and consumption processes, and the heterogeneity of players involved, a suitable and comparable data is still missing.