CCI Consumption in South Africa: Equality of access and the expenditure Gini Coefficient

Overview

An important social development goal of many countries, including South Africa, is to broaden access to and participation in arts, culture and heritage. This report uses large, national-level data sets to investigate the equality of access (proxied by consumption spending) to cultural and creative goods and services in South Africa. This is done by domain and also over time, with a focus on periods of economic shock, such as the Great Recession (2008- 2009) and the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Gini coefficient has been most frequently used as a measure on income inequality. This study uses it to assess expenditure inequality – that is, the level of inequality in spending on creative goods and services between South African household deciles. This is arranged from decile 1, which has the lowest spending, to decile 10, which has the highest spending. The Gini coefficient ranges from 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (perfect inequality). The higher the Gini coefficient, the greater the difference/inequality in spending across households.

Results showed that the expenditure Gini coefficient in 2021 for South Africa as a whole was 0.708, with the expenditure Gini coefficient for the cultural and creative industries (CCIs) being 0.747, indicating a slightly more uneven distribution of creative economy spending than for the economy as a whole. In 2021, the 2.5% of highest spending households spent 1.67% of all their spending on CCI goods and services, while the 10% lowest spending households spent 0.97% of all their spending on CCI goods and services. More than half of CCI spending was by decile 10, and 25% by the top 2.5% of households. Spending across all domains and deciles increased from R35 billion per year in 2015 to R48 billion in 2019.

The domain with the highest expenditure Gini was Performance and Celebration (0.807). International research has also found that, while informal participation in activities in this domain are more evenly spread, the formal purchase of tickets to Performance and Celebration outputs is more likely to be by higher income households. Domains with more commercial applications, such as Design and Creative Services (0.679) and Books and Press (0.646) had the lowest expenditure Gini coefficients.

The analysis also showed that, during times of economic downturn, the expenditure of South African households on CCI goods and services becomes more uneven. CCI expenditure, which is often regarded as a luxury or leisure spending category, became more unequal in both the 2008/9 and the 2020/21 economic downturns, as poorer households cut back their CCI spending in favour of other purchases. Policy implications and recommendations are discussed in the conclusion.