Regional Economic Development in Italy: Applying the Creative Class Thesis to a Test
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Regional Economic Development in Italy: Applying the Creative Class Thesis to a Test Esubalew Alehegn Tiruneh
Received: 22 March 2012 / Accepted: 15 October 2012 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012
Abstract This paper provides an empirical analysis of the impacts of Florida’s regional features also called regional climate or people climate on creative class as well as the regional economic development effects of the creative class in Italy on the basis of data drawn from Creativity Group Europe: Italy. The analyses show that a people climate of tolerance and population density has a strong and positive impact on a region’s share of the creative class which this, in turn, and technology has affected regional economic development enormously. Moreover, creative class is found to be superior to human capital in its positive impact on regional economic development where it is measured by regional per capita income. Keywords Creative class . People climate . Innovation . Technology . Regional per capita income JEL Classification R11 . O31 . O52
Introduction Florida (2002) argues that creative class1 is the cream part of the labor force for regional economic development which, according to him, it is the nature of the labor force (innovative or not) in a region that makes difference in the economic development of regions. In the context of his analysis, a region with a high share of creative people will perform better economically because these people generate more innovations, have a higher level of entrepreneurship and are able to attract good business 1 Since creative is conceptualized and interpreted in the same way as innovative, in this paper, we use creative and innovative interchangeably. Moreover, since class refers to innovative people we use class, people and individuals alternatively without necessarily affecting the original meaning of class as introduced by Florida.
E. A. Tiruneh (*) School in Social Sciences, University of Trento, Italy, Via Della Malpensada 140, 38123 Trento, Italy e-mail: [email protected]
J Knowl Econ
(Boschma and Fritsch 2009). Focusing on creative people and their occupations, his theory is a departure from several branches of literature in regional sciences as well as regional economics. The creative class is defined by Florida (2002) as people who are engaged to identify, propose new solutions or combine existing knowledge in new ways. These people are employed principally to do innovative work and include scientists, engineers, health scientists, social scientists, and knowledge-based professionals. The concept is that the creative class is inspired to be innovative through skills, inner urge as well as external stimuli such as diversity and different impressions in the working and living environment. Moreover, he characterizes the creative class as a social class due to their relation to the production process: they have ownership and control of important means of production—namely their brains and knowledge. He classifies the creative class2 into creative core
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