Indicator will be used to assess Hong Kong's richness in field of cultural capital We already have the Hang Seng Index, the Consumer Price Index, the Productivity Index and the Air Pollution Index. Now for the Creativity Index. From February, the Home Affairs Department will publish the index to assess Hong Kong's competitiveness in creative industries. Assistant secretary for home affairs Fong Ngai said the government hoped it would help attract foreign investors to the city's creative industries and help in resource allocation and policy making. The bureau has commissioned the University of Hong Kong's Centre for Cultural Policy Research to produce the index, based on similar studies by United States scholars. 'We would not like to measure the contribution of creativity purely in monetary terms,' Mr Fong said. 'There are so many indexes to measure the performance of the economy, such as the World Economic Forum's Growth Competitiveness Index. But these cannot satisfy the need to measure the level of creativity in Hong Kong.' US scholar Richard Florida had used technology, talent and tolerance of creativity as the basis of a creativity index, Mr Fong said. But the university had refined this to measure creativity in terms of capital in human resources, culture, society and institutions. To measure institutional capital, they use data such as the number of library users, public libraries and leisure facilities per 100 people. Indicators of cultural capital include participation in certain cultural activities, frequency of book reading for leisure in the past year and average hours per week spent listening to the radio. Director of the university research centre Desmond Hui Cheuk-kuen said researchers would acquire data dating back a decade so they can compare Hong Kong's situation in 1994 and 2004. 'We will conduct data collection regularly so that Hong Kong people can find out how much they have improved in each area,' he said. The government promoted the idea to culture ministers of seven Asian countries during this week's Asian Cultural Co-operation Forum in the hope they would pick up the idea and provide a regional comparison. Guangdong, Singapore and South Korea have so far indicated interest. Unesco's regional adviser for culture for Asia and the Pacific, Richard Engelhardt, also threw the world culture body's backing behind the project. Meanwhile, a survey of 600 people by the Arts Development Council found 72 per cent of respondents who did not participate in the arts said they were too busy to attend cultural events, while 22 per cent of those said they were not interested.
