The Effects of Bohemians on Regional Economic Growth

Many academic researchers, urban planners and politicians have tried to either defend or attack the hypothesis that artists are of great importance on economic growth, making this topic a heated debate in the contemporary social and academic world. This paper aims to shed light on this debate by testing whether bohemians, which are the people in artistic occupations, are causing economic growth, using the creative class theory of Richard Florida as a proxy to test this statement with. The effects of bohemians on economic growth will be explained by resynthesizing existing quantitative research that has been performed on this particular subject. To test for the effects of bohemians on economic growth, the concept of economic growth has been split up in four different indicators, the four indicators being employment growth, gross domestic product, entrepreneurship and innovation, to come to clearer conclusions on which specific indicators of economic growth clear conclusions can be drawn regarding the effect of bohemians. Furthermore, since Florida also proposes that bohemians are indirectly responsible for economic growth through the creative class, this relationship has also been researched. The main findings of this research are that human capital tends to be of stronger influence than Bohemian Indices on employment growth and gross domestic product measures. Furthermore, the relationship between entrepreneurship and bohemians happens to be only strong in the largest cities in Europe, while the quantitative research on American cities has provided ambiguous results. Regarding innovation, the main conclusion is that high-tech clustering is only related with bohemians in Canada and the United States and not so much in Europe, where the bohemians are usually concentrating in other cities than high-tech businesses. As for the influence of bohemians on other creative class categories it can be concluded that they are found to be responsible for explaining the presence of other creative class members in both Europe and North America with the magnitude of the influence of bohemians being bigger on the super-creative core than on creative professionals.