Print

Mail

wiki links

A creative Taipei can invigorate economy

Coming to Taipei last December to discuss the creative future of the city and of Taiwan as a whole was a fascinating experience.

I left enormously impressed by Taiwanese people's dedication to shaping the economic future and prosperity of their island in the best possible way, and by the determination of Taipei itself to secure its place as a truly creative city. I haven't the slightest doubt that much will be achieved as a result.

Creativity and culture are of course important for the intellectual and emotional life of a country and a community.

Creativity is the quality that enables people to think afresh, to have ideas, to tell new stories, to invent new ways of doing things, and to find ways of making life richer. It enables great music and drama to be written and performed, great art to be conceived, things of poetic beauty to be created; it helps to fire our imaginations. A brief visit to the National Palace Museum serves to remind us of this abiding truth.

But creativity and culture are also crucial for economic prosperity. They help us to find new ways of delivering services, and new products to sell; they help us to take risks and to make leaps in imagination which are what really generate progress in an enterprise. And nowhere is this more true than in relation to the "creative industries" -- those economic activities which owe their economic success and value to the creative inspiration of individuals. They include industries such as design, software, publishing, music, TV, film,advertising, architecture, computer games and fashion.

And they have close links to -- and derive much of their inspiration from -- the more traditional arts and crafts.

When I became British secretary of state for culture in 1997, I discovered that no-one had any idea at all of what the value of these creative industries was, each year, to the UK economy.

The figures and the information simply didn't exist. So I set about trying to establish the information, and put in place two "mapping" documents looking at the whole of the creative sector of the economy. The more important was the second one, published at the start of 2001. It revealed some startling statistics -- the creative industries represented ?12 billion (US$20.9 billion) in economic value each year (the current figure is probably more like ?60 billion.) They employed 1.2 million people and represented something like 6 or 7 percent of GDP.

And -- most significantly of all -- they were growing, and still are, at twice the rate of the economy as a whole. And what is true of the overall UK economy is in fact even more true for the economy of London as a city, where the creative sector is one of the two most important sectors in the entire economic life of the city.

It doesn't take an economic genius to recognize that these statistics are remarkable. What they show is that for an advanced, post-industrial economy, the creative sector is the real motor for future growth and wealth generation. And what is true for the UK today will almost certainly be true for Taiwan tomorrow.

The Taiwanese economy, having grown at astonishing rates over the last two decades, is now entering a more mature phase, and it is precisely at this sort of time, when the tremendous growth in the manufacturing sector starts to level out, that the creative sector comes into its own. And the traditional strengths that Taiwan has, in drawing great cultural benefit from its traditions and from the melding together of many different traditions from different parts of China, will give it a real advantage as it starts to develop its creative sector.

Taipei in particular is already a vibrant, lively, culturally rich city. These are excellent foundations on which to build in starting to turn it into one of the great creative cities of the world.

Chris Smith is the Right Honorable Lord Smith of Finsbury and a former member of the British parliament.
This story has been viewed 1958 times.