The most important conclusions from the report are summarised below.
The Öresund region stands out as an important cultural corridor within the Nordic region The Nordic region has approximately 30 million inhabitants and is the world's 11th largest economy. Within this geography, as within other regions that are relatively linguistically and culturally well-integrated, there tend to be dense corridors of exchange. In this report, the Öresund region appears as a corridor or point of gravity within the Nordic region. This is where the largest cross-border commuting of cultural and creative workers takes place for the countries we been able to study. At the same time, the exchange mainly takes place in the direction from Sweden to Denmark, which applies both to general work commuting and to an even greater extent the cultural sector. In addition, linguistic similarities or common linguistic influences may facilitate the understanding and appreciation of cultural expressions between the countries.
Increased cross-border commuting of cultural creators to Denmark and Sweden
The commuting of Nordic cultural creators to both Denmark and Sweden was negatively affected during the pandemic, and for Sweden, moreover, to an even greater degree than the general work commuting. However, the cross-border commuting of cultural creators recovered towards the middle of that year and was in the fourth quarter of 2022 higher than ever during the studied period.
Even level of immigrated Nordic cultural creators living in Sweden
When we study immigrated Nordic cultural creators in Sweden, we can state that the number of employed Nordic cultural creators in the Swedish labour market was not affected by the pandemic. This applies both to cultural and creative industries as well as the more defined cultural sector, i.e. artistic and cultural activities as well as entertainment activities and cultural heritage activities.
Decreased trade in cultural goods but increased trade in cultural services
We can state that trade in cultural goods has decreased in volume between the Nordic countries over the last ten-year period. At first, this can be considered contradictory, as all the Nordic countries have grown in terms of both economy and population during this period. At the same time, we note that trade in cultural services has increased, which may possibly reflect a shift of cultural expressions from goods to services. One hypothesis is that cultural consumption, in line with the general internationalisation and digitisation that occurred, during this period, has become more European, global or perhaps to increasing extent takes a detour via platforms based outside the Nordic region.
The flow of both cultural and creative workers, and cultural trade is dominated by flows from Sweden to the rest of the Nordic countries
Sweden is the largest country in the Nordic region in terms of both population and economy. For this reason, it is natural that Swedes dominate commuting flows, just as the trade in cultural goods and services is dominated by exports from Sweden. The report discusses whether these exchanges, as far as Sweden is concerned, benefit from geographical and linguistic factors. Sweden is centrally located in the Nordic region and shares a land border (or bridge connection) with more Nordic countries than any other. From a linguistic perspective, there are also similarities with the other larger Nordic countries. This probably favours cultural exports of, for example, literature, music as well as television and film, areas of cultural production where the linguistic content is important.
In the report, a number of questions are identified as interesting for further study
The method-developmental aspect of the report has mainly been about combining and analysing partially new data sources with each other. This concerns for example, recently produced commuting data for cultural and creative workers between Denmark and Sweden at a regional level, as well as data on the number of individuals, and the amounts of artist tax paid by Nordic cultural practitioners in Sweden. These aspects have by no means been fully exhausted and several interesting questions remain for further study.