This report covers the economic value that the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI) bring to South Africa in terms of their contribution to Gross Domestic Product, Employment and Trade.
This first chapter of the 2020 Cultural and Creative Industries Mapping Study estimates the macroeconomic contribution of the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs) to the gross domestic product (GDP) of the country, including the performance of the domains (using the UNESCO Framework for Cultural Statistics, 2009) over time. Information from official sources as well as reliable national databases was analysed using Input-Output modelling and a Social Accounting Matrix adapted for the CCIs.
Using the rebased 2015 GDP data, the total Gross Value Added (GVA) of the CCIs was R161 billion in 2020. This represents just under 3% of South Africa’s total economic production in 2020 and makes the sector approximately the same size as agriculture.
As found in previous mapping studies, the largest domains in terms of contribution to GDP are Design and Creative Services, and Audio-Visual and Interactive Media. The dominance of these domains is expected, since they create cultural and creative content used in film and television, video games, fashion design, architecture and advertising.
The next largest domains are Visual Arts and Crafts (R23.4 billion in 2020, 15% of the contribution to GDP), and Books and Press (R21.5 billion in 2020, 13% of the contribution to GDP). These are followed by the smaller domains of Performance and Celebration (6%) and Cultural and Natural Heritage (4%).
Looking at the growth rates between 2018 and 2020, the impact of the slowdown in the economy during 2019 and the COVID-19 lockdowns have resulted in all sectors showing some decline. The most negatively COVID-19 impacted domains are the Visual Arts and Crafts (-2.13%), and Books and Press (-1.81%), which together account for nearly a third of CCI output and employment.
As found in previous mapping studies, and in the international literature, the creative economy grows quickly when the economy as a whole is doing well but tends to decline more quickly than other sectors when economic growth slows. The CCIs generally performed better in 2017 than the South African economy as a whole. However, the growth rate for the sector slowed down relative to the South African economy from 2018.
Type II output multipliers show the backward and forward linkages of a sector to the rest of the economy. All the CCI multipliers are between 3.7 and 4.3, indicating that new spending in the sector can be expected to have large knock-on impacts in the rest of the economy.
An innovation of this report is the calculation of the Gini coefficient for each domain’s contribution to household income. The Gini coefficient is an indicator of inequality, where a higher coefficient indicates more inequality. The domain with the most unequal distribution of income is Visual Arts and Crafts. This domain includes both fine artists whose works sell internationally, often for very high prices, and crafters who may be operating informally on a small scale. Half of the poorest households in this domain earn only 8% of total income. Audio-visual and Interactive Media has one of the lower Gini coefficients in the sector. In general, however, the CCIs have a more equal distribution of income than for South Africa as a whole.
