The new series of "Creative Economy Notes" seeks to generate empirical insight into the evolving face of the creative economy and provide analysis on how policy choices affect the performance in the creative industries.

WIPO released preliminary results of its annual survey of the global publishing industry, expressing his hope that a greater number of partners will participate in the survey in the coming years. Among the survey’s findings for the countries that have so-far shared 2019 data on trade and educational publishing:

In total, 17 countries reported their total sales and licensing revenues generated by both the trade and the educational sectors. These revenues amounted to USD 64.1 billion in 2019. The United States of America (U.S.) (USD 23.5 billion) reported the largest net revenue, followed by Japan (USD 16.1 billion), the Republic of Korea (USD 6.2 billion), Germany (USD 5.6 billion) and the U.K. (USD 5.4 billion).

Seven countries provided their 2019 trade sector revenue broken down by sales channel, that is, bricks and mortar, online and other categories. Online sales generated more than half of total trade sector revenue in Sweden (50.1%) and the U.K. (55.2%). The U.S. (43.5%) also saw a large proportion of their total trade sector revenue generated by the online sales. However, the brick and mortar channel continued to generate the largest share of total trade sector revenue for most countries that reported such data for 2019. The 2021 report will chart any changes to the weight of different sales channels due to measures taken to stem the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

(Source: WIPO)