Crisis Recovery in the CEE & SEE Creative & Cultural Sectors

I have made some propsals for the Hungarian and Slovak stakeholders on how to represent the particular interests of the creative industries, particuarly the music industry in the social dialogue and policy discussion on crisis recovery policies.

My presentation provided for the Slovak music industry stakeholders in this dialogue are now made available in a more general form, because the problems in Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and to a great extent in the broader region including Austria, Slovenia and Czechia are very similar.

Around Easter and Passover, we are hoping in redemption and a new beginning. It will not be easy for these industries, but there were a lot of problems in the past decade of economic growth that did not allow musicians, film makers, broadcaster to participate in the overall benign conditions of the market. This crisis will change many economic, labor and education policies, and the creative sectors have particularly lot to gain from this.

The conclusions

• We are arguing for crisis and recovery policies that prioritize re-employment, domestic value-added growth and domestic tax income, and public investments into sectors that favour domestic value added and domestic tax base growth. ⯆ More on public investments or ⯈ Next topics

• Our policy proposals are summarized in the Central European Muisc Industry Report 2020 (see particularly recommendations), for Croatia, Slovak Music Industry Report 2019, Hungarian Music Industry Report.

• In the crisis, we recommend governments and municipalities to finance early payment of collective royalties for composers, performers and producers, and to speed up pending court cases.

• We also strongly recommend the revision of collective tariffs, to build in automatic stabilizers for crises (automatic tariff changes in recession and in economic growth.)

• For artists, technicians and managers this is the best time to build up the missing, representative organizations of the sector that can meaningfully engage in the social dialogue about crisis recovery, tax, vocational educations and future economic policies (see earlier blog post about this in English and article in Hungarian).