Jordi Sanjuán, a member of the Econcult Research Unit, holds the qualification of excellence for the thesis presented.
The doctoral thesis defended at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Valencia by Jordi Sanjuán, supported by the perspectives on the impact of cultural and creative industries on regional well-being, has received the highest qualification.
The court was composed of the professor Francesco Capone (UniFI) as chair of the panel and the chairs Montserrat Pareja (UB) and Blanca de Miguel (UPV).
This work focuses on the need to convert regional economies into new models focused on prosperity and how to face the challenges of post-industrial societies and ecological transition. In this scenario, Cultural and Creative Industries (ICC) arise, ya that these have aroused growing interest in that respect, and have been pointed out as a potential vector of welfare generation. However, at this point, little quantitative and widespread evidence of its causal impacts on various dimensions of well-being arises.
The study presented a solution to this paradigm, therefore, an analysis is carried out for 209 European regions using employment data in the Labour Force Survey (ICC) as an explanatory variable of interest, and a panel of welfare indicators coming from the OECD's regional version of the Index for Better Life Index as dependent variables, based on the causal models in each of the dimensions, the effects of ICCs are estimated using "causal forests".
The results of this thesis show positive media effects for all dimensions, but with significant differences between regions. In some dimensions, moreover, discrepancies are observed depending on the ICC definition used or the time horizon considered. However, the results suggest that ICCs are capable of improving both objective and subjective regional quality of life and well-being, although with very heterogeneous effects between regions and sensitive to different ICC definitions.
Jordi Sanjuán has been a member of the Econculted Research Unit since 2019 and has participated in numerous projects of the research unit. In addition, he is an Economist and Master in Economic Policy and Public Economics, with extraordinary awards in both degrees and has a Professional Certificate in Data Science from Harvard University. Prior to Econcult, he has developed two research grants in the Department of Applied Economics, as well as professional internships in the Directorate General of European Funds and financing of the Generalitat Valenciana.
