30-09-2019 Published: the first in a series of papers on the trade environment for cultural goods and services

CICERONE-members Andy Pratt (City University), Thomas Borén (Stockholm University), Clémentine Daubeuf and Arthur Le Gall (both from KEA) have finished the first in a series of papers on the trade environment for cultural goods and services. This first paper entitled “A review of tariff barriers and trade costs affecting the Creating Industries across European borders” is produced in the context of Work Package 3, which addresses – very shortly – the central challenge of providing a baseline for policy analysis in the field of Global Production Networks in the cultural and creative industries (click here to learn more about this WP). This Work Package will result in a series of six papers, who’s main point is to illustrate that the trade and regulatory environment has a particular relationship to cultural goods and services; one that is different to other goods and services.

This first paper is not intended to be a legal commentary or critique of trade policy, nor an exhaustive description of every measure. Instead, its aim is to focus on understanding the institutional framework and its core assumptions, capacities and capabilities, and how these impact the production, distribution, consumption and archiving of cultural goods and services both within and outside of the EU. Specifically, it seeks to understand how the trade rules based on nation states as sovereign bodies (and interalia industrial policies based upon individual firms) interacts with and affects the operation of both transnational and trans‐EU cultural production constituted by cross-bordering production chains and networks.

Overall, the tentative hypothesis that the CICERONE consortium seeks to test over this series of papers (and supplemented by the findings of the original primary research from other Work Packages, notably Work Package 2) is whether, and to what extent, the existing European, and national and regional policy frameworks concerning the cultural industries (and the wider economy) are appropriate to the challenges of the new and emergent organisational and governance forms of the creative economy.

Click below to get access to the paper: