India’s Creative Economy: A Productivity Study

The chapter outlines the nature, scope and volume of India’s creative economy. The chapter follows the approach of Kukreja et al. (Creative India: Tapping the Full Potential, 2022) and uses it to assess the productivity of creative workers relative to non-creative workers and determine the extent of divergence between labour productivity and wages of creative and non-creative workers in India. The study further uses state-level pooled data of creative occupations and empirically analyses the trends in the productivity-wage gap across states. This component of the study is undertaken for manufacturing. The study primarily uses the estimates from the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) conducted by the National Statistical Office for the period 2017–2020 to assess the employment and wages of creative and non-creative workers. A key feature of the PLFS is that the survey covers both the formal and informal sectors in India, thus enabling a much more comprehensive measurement of creative employment in the country.