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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of intersectoriality within the cultural, creative and tourism industries in Italian local development.

The research design builds on the literature on culture-led development and adapts the established body of empirical research on industrial districts to tourism and cultural development. The quantitative analysis of intersectoral specialization and the clustering of cultural, creative and tourism industries in Italian local labour systems (LLSs) combines specialization indexes with principal component analysis and cluster analysis.

About 50 per cent of Italian LLSs specialize in the economy of culture and tourism, mostly in material culture, although tourism has the highest level of specialization. There are three main patterns of agglomeration and clustering. The largest cluster is that of the cultural heritage and content and information industries, which coincides with the systems of medium-sized and large cities, followed by systems of tourism monoculture. The smallest is made up of material culture, typically made-in-Italy sectors. The tourism and material culture industries are monocultures – where tourism agglomerates, but material culture does not.

The analytical approach is quantitative and based on Istat’s Industry and Trade (2012) data set. Further studies are needed on the interaction between agglomerated specialized industries.

This paper contributes to the theoretical and political debate on the value generation and innovation potential of culture and creativity, and bridges the knowledge domains of local development and managerial studies. Novel statistical evidence on intersectoral specialization and the clustering of the cultural, creative and tourism sectors in Italy at the inter-municipal level is provided. This study helps to identify an Italian model of the economy of culture and tourism.

Despite the growing literature aimed at explaining how cultural and artistic production feeds economic growth, the causal relationships and interplays are not investigated in depth. In the attempt of filling this gap, the purpose of this paper is to examine arts, culture, and education within the framework of the New Growth Theory.

Starting from the analysis of how culture may be at the root of a specific engine of economic growth, the paper presents a theoretical endogenous growth model driven by the combination of the investments in human and cultural capital.

The paper shows that cultural investment has a positive impact on economic growth and on the level of income provided that the economy is sufficiently “culture-intensive”, and that this effect is further magnified the more total factor productivity (TFP) is sensitive to the stock of cultural capital.

The paper figures out the possibility of a cultural poverty trap as the cause of poor growth performance of some economies in the current post-industrial scenario. Culturally poor economies tend to grow slowly because of the lack of cultural exposure, which makes TFP poor since human capita is weakly inclined to be used in innovative, flexible ways.

The paper presents a new endogenous growth model. The paper argues that the available endogenous growth models fail to take into account the full set of relevant factors that make endogenous growth possible, and that the missing entry is cultural capital.

Resurgent interest in the life and work of the Italian Cambridge economist Piero Sraffa is leading to New Directions in Sraffa Scholarship. This chapter introduces readers to some of these developments. First and perhaps foremost is the fact that as of September 2016 Sraffa’s archival material has been uploaded onto the website of the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University, as digital colour images; this chapter introduces readers to the history of these events. This history provides sharp relief on the extant debates over the role of the archival material in leading to the final publication of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, and readers are provided a brief sketch of these matters. The varied nature of Sraffa scholarship is demonstrated by the different aspects of Sraffa’s intellectual legacy which are developed and discussed in the various entries of our Symposium. The conclusion is reached that we are on the cusp of an exciting phase change of tremendous potential in Sraffa scholarship.