UK creative industries ‘an export success story’

Exports of services by the UK’s creative industries continued to rise during the 2010 to 2021 period despite the impact of Brexit and Covid , a study has found.

The second report from the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre (Creative PEC), State of the Nations, published this week, found creative service exports – which are concentrated in the subsectors of IT, Film and TV, video, and advertising and marketing – are "robust and growing".

However, growth of creative goods exports – largely found in the crafts, music, performing and visual arts, and publishing subsectors – was "stagnant", showing larger drops than even total UK goods exports in 2016 and 2020, with no sign of recovery in 2021. 

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The report states that, while the UK’s creative industries are strongly internationally oriented, there is a "striking dichotomy" in the performance of trade in services versus trade in goods for the UK’s creative industries.

The report's author, Dr Sara Maioli, Senior Lecturer in Economics at Newcastle University Business School said that overall the findings are a "good news story for the UK’s creative industries". 

"However, with increasing digitalisation of the economy and the increasing share of digitally delivered services we must improve our statistical capabilities to have a more accurate understanding of the scale of this trade," she said.

"Our report emphasises the importance of UK trade policymakers negotiating digital agreements within existing and new trade agreements to future-proof international market access against this rapid technological change.”  

Priority for policymakers

Hasan Bakhshi, Professor of Economics of the Creative Industries at Newcastle University and Director of Creative PEC said that as the UK re-orients itself in global markets having left the European Union, understanding the nature of export growth opportunities and barriers "is an obvious priority for policymakers".  

"Yet, international trade is one of the areas of creative industries policy where data and analysis has been most lacking," he said. 

"Our report for the first time brings together for the UK the different sources of data that are available, and identifies priorities for future data collection”.