Valeria Salinas-Maceda i Researcher
In 2017, a young financial engineering teacher discovered that one of her students was a vocalist of a group of Paceño rock. His curiosity woke up to see how the student combined a business career with an artistic passion. The situation reminded him of his own history: an economist who had practiced folk theater and dance, and never set aside his link with culture.
During a class, the teacher mentioned a new concept for her: the creative economy. At the end, the student asked for more information, because he sensed that he could find a way to unite his artistic talent with his professional training. The episode reflected the encounter between two generations, two races linked to finance and two trajectories crossed by creativity, all looking for a bridge between economy and art.
The context, however, was adverse. In 2017, no university in Bolivia included the creative economy in its programs, not even as an optional subject. That absence in academic training revealed a gap: the country lacked a formal space to integrate the arts and economy. Today, in 2025, this challenge still persists.
What is the creative economy? Why raise your inclusion as a subject in universities? This is an area of the economy whose analysis center are the goods and services generated with creativity as the main input. This production has a functional value, but also has a high symbolic value for its creative, innovative and/or identity load.
This economy covers creative and cultural industries, their value chains, job generation, foreign trade or public policies based on creativity. Returning to the anecdote, the creative economy is the space in which, both the student and the teacher, would have achieved the match they were looking for. From this perspective, both could have designed business plans for the music industry or studied the behavior of the performing arts consumer with an economic model.
Understanding that economy and creativity are complemented is to recognize a latent need. In the country we have a wide population of creatives that move in different industries. Its production is a contribution to economic growth. The complex is when we want to know who they are, how many are, in which regions are or what is your contribution to GDP.
Many of these questions remain in the air waiting for timely answers. On the one hand, we have government entities that have not yet been interested in generating data on the creative sector. This carelessness invisible the creative industries in the map of actors wrapped in the circles of productive development. What is not seen, is not known. Given this complex scenario, curricular meshes have yet preferred not to do so. A decision that should make a different course.
Incorporating the creative economy in university classrooms can add future vision to business careers. Taking this step would diversify the professional profile of the students to insert themselves in an area that tends bridges between the economic, the creative and the cultural. At the same time, promoting research in creative economy responds to this ignorance and little visibility of the creative sector. It is from the creation of knowledge that these gaps can be filled to start talking about the Bolivian creative class.
Economic development is not only defined in the extractive industry or financial markets. It is promoted from the scenarios, recording studies, design workshops or folk expressions. In this sense, it is necessary that university education responds to a new context, where young people create from innovation and from their identity, looking for that match between economy and creativity that several years ago a teacher and their student also wanted to find.
Curious final data: that teacher was me. I found my perfect match generating academic research in the area of the creative economy with indigenous identity, a sector that I consider key to our economic growth since social inclusion.
