Forum focuses on cultural industry

In a bid to promote the burgeoning of Taiwan's creative industries, the Council for Cultural Affairs (CCA) organized an international symposium with the European Union Study Association-Taiwan yesterday in order to benefit from the EU's experience in both promoting and policing the cultural industry.

Addressing the symposium entitled "Creative Industry": A Global Thought and Future Action in Taiwan, vice chairman of the CCA Wu Mi-cha (吳密察) noted that Taiwan is experiencing an economic transformation from labor-intensive industries to knowledge-based industries. He said that the cultural industry has a role to play in Taiwan's development.

"In Europe, the cultural creative industry has a solid and successful development model that is notably worthwhile for Taiwan to learn from," Wu said.

Citing the UK as an example, Wu said the creative industry there has become the core economic-development force in Britain. In fact among all economic sectors, the creative industry has generated the second largest revenues since 1997, accounting for 7.9 percent of Britain's GNP.

The symposium, which runs till Saturday, has invited major creative cultural-policy researchers from the European Commission, Austria, Netherlands and Australia to engage in discussions with Taiwan's economic and cultural officials, as well as local artists.

Issues to be discussed include the EU's basis for the promotion of creative industry, challenges and opportunities for the creative industry in the globalized economy, global marketing strategy of the creative industry as well as the bottlenecks and turning points faced by local artists in Taiwan.

Christophe Forax, a spokesperson for the education and culture division of the European Commission, said that Taiwan could learn from Europe's experience.

Forax explained that the EU has for the past few years provided a legal framework that facilitates the development and growth of the cultural creative industry.

That framework entails a quota system that both requires and encourages European broadcasters to air programs and cultural works produced by artists in EU countries.

The EU also has a program which supports the development, distribution and promotion of European audiovisual works inside Europe and on other continents.

"Fair and regular financing resources are distributed to the European media sectors, including projects using digital technologies ? and the European film industry," Forax said.

Under such initiatives, the cultural diversity of the various European countries are both protected and encouraged, Forax said.

"To a certain degree, we help preserve the European cultural distinctiveness as opposed to the mass invasion from media productions from non-EU member states such as the US," Forax said.

Forax said that in 2000, the EU's trade deficit with the US on the television rights market was US$4 billion and US$8 billion for all audiovisual services. But after the enforcement of these regualtions, the market shares of European and US movies on European screens have been stabilized.

"A share of 20 percent to 30 percent of the box office goes to the national and European works, and tickets sold for European films outside their country of origin are about 10 percent of total ticket sales," Forax indicated.

In addition to a legal framework to ensure that European TV programs don't disappear from the screen, support is also delivered to small cultural industries through the EU programs.