Pietrzyk, Nicolas
The direct economic impact of culture in 2020
- 2023.
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In 2020, the direct economic impact of culture, i.e. the total value-added of all areas of culture, amounted to some 46.1 billion euros, i.e. 2.2% of France’s gross domestic product (GDP).In 2020, culture was particularly affected by the health crisis. Cultural GDP saw a 7.1% drop in value, a more dramatic decline than that experienced by the French economy as a whole, which dropped by 5.3%. However, this decline in value has been amortised by the size of the non-market sector and the conventions for estimating the value-added produced by this sector. The volume of all areas of the cultural sectors has sharply diminished, with the volume of cultural value-added dropping by 15%, some 7 percentage points below that for the French economy as a whole which was down by 8%. No areas of the cultural sector were spared, with the performing arts worst affected (-37%), followed by cultural heritage (-24 %), the visual arts (-21 %), and then press and book publishing (-9 %), architecture (-9 %) and audiovisual (-8%). Experiences across the audiovisual sector have been very mixed, with video games seeing significant growth (+21%) whilst the cinema sector recorded heavy losses, with the film screening sector down 66%.Audiovisual made the highest contribution to the economy in 2020, followed by the performing arts and the press and book publishing. The most significant developments over the last twenty years have been the structural decline of the book and press sector and the rise of the audiovisual sector.In 2019, there were 720,700 people employed in the cultural sectors (2.7% of the working population). The main employer within this is the audiovisual sector (16%), closely followed by the performing arts (15%) and visual arts (15%). Over the course of ten years, the cultural sector workforce increased by 14%, as compared with 3% for the economy as a whole. 31% of cultural professionals are self-employed, as compared with 12% of employed workers in the economy as a whole.