1. The aim of this study is to provide the first ever measure of the economic contribution of copyright relevant and related rights-relevant industries in India. The copyright-relevant industries are those defined by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) as “activities or industries where copyright [and related rights] play an identifiable role”.
2. We adopted the methodology put forward in the WIPO (2015) Guide on surveying the economic contribution of copyright-related industries in India, which intends to maximise comparability with previous studies in other countries. We conduct the study for 2016-2017, which is the latest year where most of the required economic indicators are available at WIPO-defined industry categorisations.
3. Our primary data source is the Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) conducted by the Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation (MOSPI), which gives comprehensive coverage of the manufacturing sector. We also aggregate company-level data from the Prowess database published by the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy and use this to supplement the ASI data for industries outside of manufacturing. We include data from industry studies such as the FICCI-KPMG report and the survey by the media and entertainment industry Skills Council (MESC) to cover industries outside of manufacturing. For the exports and imports figures, we use the trade data published by the Directorate General of Commercial Intelligence and Statistics (DGCI&S), which gives a comprehensive value for all goods traded. We supplement the exports and imports figures with trade data from the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on audio-visual services.
4. For the selection of industries to include, we used the WIPO guide. WIPO distinguishes four categories: Core Copyright Industries, Interdependent Copyright Industries, Partial Copyright Industries and Non-Dedicated Support Industries. In 2016-2017, the Core Copyright Industries accounted for 44.74% of the value added generated by Indian copyright-relevant industries. Similar to other countries, the Core Copyright industries have the highest share of value added across all copyright-related industries.
5. The economic contribution of Indian copyright-relevant industries has been measured using three indicators: the Gross Value Added (the value added to goods and services used in the production process), employment, and the balance of trade (exports minus imports). Data is taken for the most recent year available (2016-2017). Table 1 summarises our results.
6. The Gross Value Added (GVA) of copyright-relevant industries amounted to Rs. 888.89 Billion in 2016-2017, or 0.58% of the Indian Gross Domestic Product (GDP)3. The Central Statistical Office reports GVA by 2-digit industries, to which we cannot apply the WIPO methodology. Our calculations cannot include this data, making our overall calculation for GVA an underestimation. The international average from available WIPO studies from varying years is a contribution of 5.48% by mean and 4.83% by median. The share of GVA of creative industries in overall GDP is visibly less for India than that of other countries. This can be partially attributed to the lack of comprehensive GVA data outside of the formal manufacturing sector, but not entirely, as we describe in the next point.
7. As a benchmark, consider the share of creative economy in the partial and interdependent industries, which mainly come under manufacturing. We can compare this to total manufacturing GVA. The share is 2.97% of total manufacturing GVA, which is still lower than median and mean shares to GDP from other countries, globally as well as across Asia.
8. Employment in India’s copyright-relevant industries is approximately 1.1 million workers. The share to total employment cannot be calculated due to the absence of official employment data for 2016- 2017. However, we calculate the share of partial and interdependent industries to total manufacturing employment in a calculation similar to the one for GVA described above using the ASI manufacturing employment data. This gives a share of 2.72% of copyright-related employment in manufacturing. The average share of national employment in other countries equals 5.4%, once again suggesting that the low share of copyright-related industries can only be partially explained by the lack of data.
9. Employment elasticity is high at 0.87 for the set of copyright-relevant industries. The highest elasticity is for the partial copyright industries due to their high labour intensity.
10. Economic contribution was furthermore measured in terms of the trade balance, which equals exports minus imports. Note that this measure captures only goods traded and excludes copyright-related services. We also add in audio-visual services from the FICCI Frames report for 2016 as they are a large component, but data on other services are not available. India is a net exporter in the Core, Partial and Non-Dedicated Copyright industries, while it is a net importer in the Interdependent Copyright industries. Overall, copyright relevant industries had a deficit of USD 16.4 Billion in 2016-2017, while overall India ran a trade deficit. Note that using unweighted data, we would get a trade surplus of USD 34 billion. This divergence is due to several methodological concerns including the absence of trade data on services, the prescribed method for selection of weights, and the detail of HS product code selected.
11. Various methodological and data issues had to be resolved to finalise this study. There are minimal assumptions on industry mappings from the WIPO guide to India’s industry classification, which can often require assumptions for other countries. We make assumptions on assigning shares to narrow industries which overlap with each other, or report their data in an aggregated fashion. We also make simplifying assumptions on the weights or copyright factors, in the absence of firm survey and interview data. For the trade calculations, there is no reliable mapping between industry and product codes, so we matched these by description. Finally, we supplement core datasets with aggregate figures from company reports and industry reports for groups of narrow industries, in the absence of comprehensive data at the narrow industry level that the WIPO methodology requires.
12. For a richer estimate of the size of the copyright economy in India, our recommendation is for government agencies to produce an advanced version of this study. Access to data on GVA at the narrow industry level from the CSO will be necessary to estimating the contribution of copyrightrelated activities accurately. Trade data on services is crucial to capture the copyright economy for India. Estimates of employment from household and small enterprise surveys can be used to capture the informal sector.
13. Several qualitative aspects of the creative economy can also be included for better understanding of the creative economy. Periodic documentation of the copyright-relevant sectors can help understand trends. This study can be considered the first step towards measuring India’s creative economy.
14. The WIPO methodology is more amenable to developed country settings where almost all economic activity takes place in the formal sector. The informal economy remains out of scope in settings such as India. We recommend WIPO consider this in future versions of its guide.
Attribution: Dr. Megha Patnaik. “Measuring India’s Creative Economy,” Report No. 003, May 2020, Esya Centre.