International audiovisual sector profiling

Since 2010, the “Io sono Cultura” Report, curated by Fondazione Symbola and Unioncamere, annually reconstructs a statistical framework on the Italian cultural and creative industrial supply chains. In these researches, “audiovisual” – in line with the tendency of main international studies – refers to all those activities related to films, videos, radio broadcasting and television programming, (ATECO codes 2007 – up to four detailed figures)*.

Setting off from this area that defines the audiovisual borders, for this work it was decided to adopt a perimeter closer to the actual sector investigated, more specifically belonging to Film and Television, which we shall hereby call Audiovisual core.

The data used for the study of these industries were provided by two sources:

• The Archivio Statistico delle Imprese Attive (ASIA) of Istat – a database already used as a foundation for the profiling of the national account figures related to non-agricultural private sectors and more generally for the analysis of official statistics;
• The Registro delle Imprese of the Chambers of Commerce. 

As for the method adopted by the Report “Io sono cultura,” estimates were made regarding internal employment (i.e. pinpointed by workplaces) and added value for each ATECO class. 

Once the main domestic data were quantified, the survey had a further objective: to piece together the audiovisual sector according to the funds granted to the TV industry and to the film industry. While for 59.14 and 60.20 the classes are clear-cut (in the first case all companies are related to cinema, while in the second to television), for the three remaining classes (59.11, 59.12, 59.13) it wasn’t possible to identify a prevalence of one of the two groups, which led to the implementation of a specific research within different areas carried out starting from the microdata related to a sample of over 4,000 active companies:

1. The first was based on the elaboration of textual data concerning the corporate objectives and, more specifically, through text mining techniques, in order to identify keywords in the corporate objectives that might indicate the productive orientation of each company according to a scale divided in three groups (mainly television; mixed; mainly cinema);
2. The second took off from the Chambers of Commerce archives by analyzing the activity description of each company in order to trace the strings “Cine” or “Tele/Tv”;
3. The third focused on verifying the secondary activities of companies within the Chamber of Commerce archives, in order to analyze further activities (not necessarily enacted) beyond the main one. In this case, the classification criterion was based on the presence of secondary activities within the two clear-cut classes (59.14 for cinema and 60.20 for television);
4. The fourth took its cue from the Tax Credit archives for audiovisual products, published by MiBAC and distinguished by type (audiovisual or filmic); the eventual exploitation of these funds made it possible to understand in which production area/areas the company was active;
5. The last was based on the observation of products and releases found directly on the websites of more than half of the companies analyzed, for an employment rate coverage of nearly 90% of the sector.

Overall, each company has been reclassified according to these three fields, in order to estimate the value of the contribution of each sub-group to the audiovisual sector (companies, employment and added value).

^(*) Ateco 2007 is the Italy’s official classification of economic activities adopted by the Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (Istat) for domestic statistical surveys of economic nature. Ateco 2007 is the Italian version of the Nomenclature of Economic Activities (NACE) adopted by Eurostat in its most recent version (rev. 2), and adapted by Istat to the specific features of the Italian economic system in its most detailed voices. Ateco 2007 is perfectly consistent to NACE up to the fourth detailed figure (615 classes), whereas the fifth (categories) and sixth digits (sub-categories) describe specifically Italian activities.

(**) Added value, meaning the indicative datum of the productive activity of each sector, is computed as the difference between the value of the production of goods and services achieved by single productive categories and the value of the intermediate goods and services utilized (raw and auxiliary materials and services provided by other productive units). The sum of the added value of the different domestic economic fields, increased by VAT and indirect taxes on imports, provides the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

(***) This list is achieved by omitting nearly 1,300 self-employed workers from the total that can be found in the Istat registers, workers that cannot be classified as companies and therefore are not listed in the Business Register archives (‘Registro delle Imprese’) which would offer the necessary qualification data (corporate objectives, activity description, etc.).