The ‘cultural and creative industries’ concept is a new but relevant one. Several previous works have tried to link a more intense presence of these with the regions welfare. However, there is no conclusive one in the literature. In this article, we build a theoretical framework to interpret the causality between richness and employed in cultural sectors, then, using regional data for Spain between the years 2000 and 2008, we focus in testing the relationship between GDPpc and the employment in the ‘cultural and creative industries’ in order to assess if any kind of causality actually exists. Our results seem promising, having found there is a significant feedback (bi-directional causality) between the variation in the GDPpc and the variation in the employment intensity in the ‘creative industries’. These findings, together with other parallel results, reveal a significant effect on the scope and functionality of cultural policy.