The Creative Economy Is Upstream of the Tourism Economy Now

A fascinating new paper by economist and YouTube analyst-celebrity Jeffrey Sachs for Saudi’s FII Institute on AI and emerging economies caught my attention last week. As the old labor-intensive manufacturing path narrows, he argues, employment growth in many developing markets will increasingly land in services: construction, healthcare, education, tourism, public administration, and the creative economy. He treats tourism and the creative economy as neighboring sectors in the same development story. That is true as far as it goes.

But in travel, the relationship is becoming more consequential than that. The creative economy is increasingly what generates tourism demand in the first place — it is increasingly what makes destinations memorable and bookable.

This matters because the tourism industry still tends to think of culture as a supporting asset. A campaign borrows from it. A destination video dresses itself in it. A tourism board packages it into a slo