The challenge of collecting and maintaining accurate and relevant data on intellectual property in four regional nations, is being tackled from one angle thanks to a Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) grant project piloted in 2022. The Intellectual Property Data Collection Accelerator and Study is one of the many impactful projects facilitated by the CDB’s Cultural and Creative Industries Innovation Fund (CIIF). That multi-donor fund, established by the Barbados-based regional development financial institution in 2017, aims to increase the global competitiveness of the dynamic cultural industries in the CDB’s 19 borrowing member states.

Richard Harris, Deputy Director of Statistics in the Central Statistics Office (CSO) of St Lucia and the project lead, reflected on the success of the initiative. He assured that it has led to greatly expanded knowledge among data collection officers and statisticians about the value of intellectual property being generated by creatives and cultural industry practitioners. Though led by the CSO in St Lucia, the project also encompassed participation of personnel from national statistical offices in Grenada, Trinidad and Tobago, and Jamaica.

To this end, he explained that while there is still much more to be achieved, there is greater sensitivity among officials in statistical offices about the need to and ways to compile this data. Harris, an economic statistician, lamented that data gathering on activities involving goods is much less challenging than that of services and more specifically, intellectual property. In fact, consistently compiled, accurate, and current data on social and economic activity represent a major deficit facing most developing nations, including those in the Caribbean.

Harris asserted “There are trade agreements such as the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) between the European Union and CARIFORUM [CARICOM and the Dominican Republic] that provide generous concessions to the creative and cultural industries. However, when you examine the data that exists, you find that the contribution of the creative and cultural industries continues to remain substantially low”. The economic statistician holds the view that part of the problem lies with a lack of appreciation and knowledge of the economic value of intellectual property among statistical offices in the region, and thus, the absence of supporting data. “Access and the availability of the requisite data to gather the evidence that is required to formulate policy and develop the industries, would also allow us to take advantage of the concessionary provisions provided in the trade agreements such as the EPA,” he added.

The high level of informal operations in the creative sector also represents a stumbling block. “A sizeable percentage of these establishments are home-based enterprises and many artistes and producers, for example, are still operating in the realm of informality. Proper financial record keeping presents challenges too for statistical offices and it stymies the industries’ development,” Harris pointed out. Despite this, the Intellectual Property Data Collection Accelerator and Study has enhanced the capacity of statistical offices in the participating countries to source and compile information for inclusion in national statistics.

According to Harris “If you examine our GDP estimates, you will find that the creative sector and the creative industries, and services on a whole . . . have little visibility . . . but the project aimed to bring about change there.” Harris is confident that building capacity within the respective participating statistical offices was achieved. The officers were trained in various aspects of data collection through working with a variety of data sources. As Harris explained “If the traditional financial records were not available then we looked at other administrative sources such as the Inland Revenue Departments and the National Insurance. We also looked at how we could extract data from existing sources such as labour force and enterprise surveys.”

Another essential objective of the project, which was fulfilled to a certain extent, involved updating the previously researched data by Dr Vanus James, a Trinidadian mathematical economist and statistician/econometrician, who is also a former Senior Policy Advisor at the United Nations Development Programme and consultant to the World Intellectual Property Organisation. The project leader was effusive in his appreciation for CDB’s input, while admitting there was still much more work to be done in educating those involved in the cultural and creative industries that providing data also works in their favour in shaping policy decisions.