Beyond the headcount: how Hong Kong must learn to value its creative economy

In the years after the pandemic, Hong Kong began counting again. Visitor numbers climbed. Receipts followed. By most conventional markers, the city's cultural sector was recovering. But a growing chorus of analysts argues that the recovery is measuring the wrong things — and in doing so, undervaluing a sector that, if properly accounted for, might be far more significant than the headline figures suggest.

The argument, articulated in recent commentary from South China Morning Post, is straightforward: a city that judges its creative economy by foot traffic and tourist spend is a city that cannot see itself clearly. Without granular measurement — of creative employment, of intellectual property value, of the spillover effects that culture generates across design, technology, and hospitality — policy defaults to the blunt instruments of the past.

What Hong Kong needs, the analysis suggests, is a different set of instruments. The question is whether it has the time to build them.

The old model and its limits

For decades, Hong Kong tied cultural policy to tourism. The equation was simple: more visitors, more receipts, more cultural infrastructure. Museums, concert venues, and heritage districts were evaluated partly on their ability to attract non-local spending. This was not irrational — the city built a formidable cultural brand on the back of that model, drawing regional visitors to a proposition that mixed accessibility with a particular East-meets-West aesthetic.

But the model has structural weaknesses. It is heavily exposed to external shocks, as the pandemic demonstrated with brutal clarity. It incentivises spectacle over substance — the headline act, the tourism spike — while leaving the underlying ecosystem of designers, filmmakers, musicians, and digital creatives relatively invisible in official statistics. And it creates a measurement gap that makes policy intervention difficult: if you cannot price something, you cannot easily justify public investment in it.

The result is that Hong Kong's creative sector occupies an ambiguous position in the city's economic identity. It is present — in the global film festivals, the international fashion weeks, the design studios that work on Mainland and overseas briefs — but it is not institutionally legible in the way that finance, logistics, or professional services are. That legibility gap is the core of the problem.

What measurement changes

The corollary of poor measurement is poor policy. Singapore, for instance, has set an explicit target for its creative industries — positioning them as a core pillar of the national economic plan rather than a secondary cultural amenity. The Singapore Economic Development Board has specific programmes targeting design, media, and digital content. Hong Kong has no equivalent framework, partly because the underlying data does not exist to make the case for one.

This is not merely an accounting problem. Better measurement would do several things simultaneously. It would allow the government to identify which sub-sectors are generating the most employment or the highest value-add. It would make the case for infrastructure investment — studios, co-working spaces, production facilities — more tractable. It would give banks and investors the data they need to finance creative ventures, replacing the reliance on personal networks and guanxi that characterises much of the current funding landscape. And it would give the sector a seat at the policy table commensurate with its actual weight in the economy.

The challenge is that creative value is genuinely difficult to measure. Unlike goods exports or financial services revenue, the outputs of the creative economy are often intangible — a brand, a design, a script, a performance. They do not always appear in conventional GDP calculations. But this, analysts note, is a problem of methodology rather than a reason to abandon the project. Creative economy accounting frameworks exist. The question is whether Hong Kong chooses to adopt them.

The structural advantage

There is a case that Hong Kong is better positioned than it sometimes recognises. The city sits at the intersection of Mainland China's vast manufacturing base and an international financial system that remains open to Hong Kong-based entities. For creative industries that involve design, product development, or brand management — sectors where Mainland production meets global market access — Hong Kong offers a logistical and legal proposition that few other cities can replicate.

The Greater Bay Initiative, which links Hong Kong, Macau, and nine Mainland cities into an integrated economic zone, opens further possibilities. If the Bay Area is to become a centre for advanced manufacturing and design, the creative inputs — the IP, the aesthetic sensibility, the market intelligence — will need to come from somewhere. Hong Kong has the talent pipeline, the legal infrastructure for IP protection, and the international connectivity to be that somewhere. The astronaut programme, which has generated a measurable surge in STEM and space-education interest among Hong Kong's young population, is one expression of the city's capacity to build prestige-driven pipelines that feed into higher-value activity.

Trade arrangements with ASEAN, cemented through the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement and reinforced by RCEP, give Hong Kong's creative exporters preferential market access across a region that is itself rapidly upgrading its consumer base. A Hong Kong design studio selling to Indonesian or Vietnamese brands operates from a position of structural advantage — but only if it can be found, financed, and measured in the first place.

The competitive horizon

The cost of inaction is not abstract. Neighbouring economies are moving deliberately. Singapore has made creative industries a stated policy priority. South Korea has embedded cultural exports in its national development strategy with results that have reshaped global popular culture. Mainland cities — Shenzhen, Shanghai, Hangzhou — are investing heavily in design and content ecosystems, with state support that Hong Kong's market-driven model does not replicate.

If Hong Kong fails to build the measurement and institutional infrastructure to price its creative sector accurately, the likely outcome is that the sector continues to generate value — but that value accrues elsewhere. Deals will be struck in Singapore. Productions will move to Shenzhen. The talent pipeline will be recruited by employers who can articulate what they are worth.

The city's tourism recovery is real. The visitor numbers are back. But the more important question — what Hong Kong's culture is actually worth, to itself and to the world — remains unanswered. Closing that gap is not simply an accounting exercise. It is the difference between a city that manages its creative economy and one that merely hosts it.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/SCMPNews/15158
• https://t.me/SCMPNews/15156