Anantam IASPost · 14 September 2026

Orange Economy: Why Orange, How It’s Measured and India’s AVGC Push

Study Notes · Art and Culture · General Studies · GS III · Indian Economy · Industrial Policy

Orange Economy explained: who coined it in 2013, what it covers, how UNCTAD measures creative trade and where India's WAVES and AVGC push stands.

The orange economy is another name for the creative economy, the part of an economy where value comes mainly from ideas and the intellectual property that protects them rather than from physical goods. Felipe Buitrago Restrepo and Iván Duque Márquez, two Colombians then working at the Inter-American Development Bank, gave it the name in a 2013 book, and the label now stretches from crafts and theater to films and video games. It matters because creative services are among the fastest-growing parts of world trade, and India is one of their largest exporters.

Most readers meet the phrase in a Budget speech or a summit headline and assume it’s an Indian government scheme, or a polite new word for the film industry. It’s neither. The orange economy is a way of grouping and counting creative work that the United Nations recognized in 2019, and India’s biggest official push behind the label came in 2025 and 2026: the Prime Minister described the WAVES summit of May 2025 as the dawn of India’s orange economy, and the Budget speech of February 2026 gave it a heading of its own. What needs settling is what counts as orange and how much of India’s push has money behind it.

What Is the Orange Economy?

The orange economy is the set of activities in which ideas become goods and services whose value rests mainly on intellectual property, the legal ownership of a creation such as a song or a game design. The UN General Assembly used the phrase in resolution 74/198 of 19 December 2019, which noted that the creative economy is “known as the ‘orange economy’ in a number of countries”.

FactDetail
MeaningThe creative economy: activities whose value comes mainly from ideas, culture and intellectual property
Coined byFelipe Buitrago Restrepo and Iván Duque Márquez, in The Orange Economy: An Infinite Opportunity (Inter-American Development Bank, 2013)
Why orangeThe authors call it the color of culture and creativity, tracing it to a pigment used in ancient Egyptian royal tombs
UN recognitionResolution 74/198 (19 December 2019) declared 2021 the International Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development
Global trade, 2024Creative services exports $1.7 trillion; creative goods exports $709 billion (UNCTAD)
India’s rankFourth-largest exporter of creative services in 2024, at $102 billion (UNCTAD)
India’s flagship eventWAVES summit, Mumbai, 1 to 4 May 2025; second edition planned for Mumbai in 2027
Budget measureBudget 2026-27: AVGC Content Creator Labs in 15,000 secondary schools and 500 colleges through IICT Mumbai
Data caveatThe Economic Survey 2025-26 sizes the media and entertainment sector with FICCI-EY industry estimates, about ₹2.5 trillion in 2024

Where the Term Came From and Why Orange

The name came out of a development bank, not a culture ministry, and it relabeled an idea governments had been mapping for 15 years. Britain’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport published its Creative Industries Mapping Documents on 9 April 1998, a sector-by-sector survey of 13 creative industries running from advertising and antiques to software and television.

Buitrago and Duque wrote The Orange Economy: An Infinite Opportunity for the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in 2013, as a primer aimed first at Latin America and the Caribbean. They refused to fix one definition, calling a universal one “both absurd and unnecessary”. Their working test was simpler: if the value of a good or service rests on intellectual property, it belongs.

The color was a deliberate choice. The authors point to orange as a pigment used in ancient Egypt to decorate the tombs of the pharaohs, and treat it as the signature color of culture and creativity. Nothing in their explanation ties it to saffron or to any national flag; the choice was made at the IDB for a Latin American readership.

Colombia then turned the idea into statute. Law 1834 of 23 May 2017, known as the Ley Naranja or Orange Law, set out to promote the creative economy, and Duque carried the idea into government as President of Colombia from 2018 to 2022. Buitrago later served as Colombia’s culture minister.

The Road to the UN Year

The idea reached the UN through a run of conferences in the two years after Colombia’s law. These are the dates to fix:

Resolution 74/198 asked the secretariat of UNCTAD, the UN’s trade and development body, to report on the Year through a dedicated section of its Creative Economy Outlook, in consultation with UNESCO.

What the Orange Economy Includes

Anything whose value comes from a creative idea that can be owned and sold again belongs in the orange economy. Buitrago’s own list, given to UN News in 2024, sorts into four groups:

The IDB book splits this world in two, and UNCTAD’s data follow the same line:

The engine underneath is intellectual property. Here’s how value moves through one hypothetical project, an animated series made in Pune for a global streaming service:

  1. The script and the characters are copyrighted works from the moment they’re written and drawn.
  2. The animation and VFX work sold to the foreign platform is a creative services export, and nothing physical crosses the border.
  3. Dubbing into more languages resells the same episodes in new markets without a new shoot.
  4. Toys and printed merchandise based on the characters are creative goods, and their value depends on the license to use those characters.

Made once, sold many times: the asset is the copyright, not the studio, which is why the note on the intangible economy is the natural companion to this one.

A copyright works a little like a flat that earns rent each time someone moves in. The comparison holds for income, but it breaks on protection. A flat can be locked, and a film file can be copied in seconds, so creative value is only as safe as the law that polices copying. In India that base law is the Copyright Act, 1957, covered in the note on the Copyright Act.

India’s government draws its own boundary through the four pillars of the WAVES summit:

Buitrago’s list starts with crafts and theater; India’s starts with broadcasting and AVGC-XR, a sign that its working definition leans toward media and technology.

How UNCTAD Measures the Creative Economy

UNCTAD measures the creative economy mainly through trade: it tags goods and services with a significant creative component and adds up their exports. For goods it uses the Harmonized System, the product codes customs officers use to classify every shipment. For services it uses the Extended Balance of Payments Services classification, the list of service categories countries use when they report what they sell abroad.

The latest figures, for 2024, were last updated by UNCTAD on 2 April 2026:

The ranking is where India enters. UNCTAD lists India fourth among creative services exporters in 2024:

RankEconomyCreative services exports, 2024
1Ireland$332 billion (19% of the world market)
2United States$294 billion
3United Kingdom$108 billion
4India$102 billion
5Germany$96 billion

Now the trap. Add $1.7 trillion to $709 billion, call the $2.4 trillion the size of the world’s orange economy, and you’ve made the easiest mistake in this topic. Those are exports. A Marathi film watched in Nashik never crosses a border, so it isn’t in the number at all. The trade data measure what countries sell to one another, not what their creative sectors produce.

The services basket is also wider than it sounds. UNCTAD’s own summary puts software and research and development inside creative services, which is a likely reason India, a large exporter of IT services, ranks fourth. Treat that as an inference; UNCTAD’s summary doesn’t break India’s figure down by activity.

For the size of the sector inside economies, the estimates are looser. UNCTAD’s Creative Economy Outlook 2024, as cited in India’s Economic Survey 2025-26, puts the creative industries at between 0.5% and over 7% of GDP across countries. UNESCO’s 2022 global report on creativity policy puts the cultural and creative sectors at 3.1% of world GDP and 6.2% of all workers. The two bodies count different things, so the figures shouldn’t be set side by side. Creative services are, in the end, one slice of the wider story told in the note on services-sector-led growth.

How India Has Built Its Orange Economy Policy

India hasn’t passed an orange economy law of the Colombian kind. Its policy runs through the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) and has been assembled piece by piece since 2022.

The AVGC Promotion Task Force

The MIB set up the AVGC Promotion Task Force in April 2022, after that year’s Union Budget announced it. Its report, submitted in December 2022, recommended these steps:

The Indian Institute of Creative Technologies

The task force’s center of excellence became the Indian Institute of Creative Technologies (IICT) in Mumbai. The MIB signed its MoU with the Government of Maharashtra on 11 April 2025, and the PIB release on the MoU describes the institute as meant to do for the media and entertainment sector what the IITs and IIMs did for technology and management. The ownership deserves a careful look:

So IICT isn’t a government institute in the usual sense. It’s a partnership in which industry holds the larger share.

Anti-Piracy Teeth in Film Law

The Cinematograph (Amendment) Act, 2023 added anti-piracy provisions to the Cinematograph Act, 1952. Sections 6AA and 6AB make unauthorized recording and distribution of films punishable with imprisonment of up to 3 years and a fine that can reach 5% of a film’s audited gross production cost.

The Orange Economy in India Today

India’s orange economy has moved from summit speeches into the Budget, though it’s still sized with industry numbers.

WAVES 2025. The first World Audio Visual and Entertainment Summit ran from 1 to 4 May 2025 at the Jio World Convention Centre in Mumbai. Opening it, the Prime Minister described WAVES as the dawn of India’s orange economy. The 77 participating nations adopted the WAVES Declaration at its Global Media Dialogue, and the government reported deals worth ₹1,328 crore at the WAVES Bazaar marketplace.

Economic Survey 2025-26. Tabled on 29 January 2026, the Survey’s services chapter carries Box VII.6, titled “The Orange Economy – An Emerging Lever for Media, Tourism and Urban Services”. It defines the orange economy as the part of the economy driven by creativity and intellectual property, then spends most of its space on live concerts. The section around it quotes these numbers from a FICCI-EY industry report:

The box also names the bottlenecks. A live event can need anywhere from 10 to 15 clearances, and the MIB is building a Single Window Mechanism for Live Entertainment Permissions. The Survey points to a shortage of venues and to limits on foreign payments to visiting artists, and suggests opening heritage monuments to such events. The full box is in Chapter 7 of the Survey, and the wider document is summarized in the note on the Economic Survey 2025-26.

Union Budget 2026-27. Presented on 1 February 2026, the Budget speech gives the orange economy its own heading. Paragraph 60 says the AVGC sector is projected to need 2 million professionals by 2030, and proposes support for IICT Mumbai to set up AVGC Content Creator Labs in 15,000 secondary schools and 500 colleges. The next paragraph proposes a new National Institute of Design for the eastern region, chosen through a challenge route. The rest of the Budget is covered in the note on the Budget 2026-27.

WAVES 2027. On 17 July 2026, a Ministry delegation briefed the Maharashtra Chief Minister on preparations for the second edition of WAVES, scheduled for Mumbai in 2027, with the Jio World Convention Centre proposed as the venue again.

Why the Orange Economy Matters and Where It Falls Short

The case for the orange economy is a services and skills case. The case against it is mostly about measurement and protection. The strengths first:

The limits are just as real.

Weak data. The Survey’s figures for the sector come from an industry report, and UNCTAD’s are estimates built by tagging product and service codes. Resolution 74/198 itself stressed the need for “regular, reliable and comparable data”. Neither the Survey’s box nor the Budget speech puts a number on the orange economy’s share of India’s GDP.

Uneven work. A BCG report released at WAVES 2025 estimated India’s active digital creators at 2 to 2.5 million, people whose income runs through platforms rather than payrolls. UNESCO’s 2022 report found that audiences are consuming more cultural content while creators struggle to make ends meet, and it counted 10 million culture and creativity jobs lost worldwide in 2020.

IP leakage. Value in this sector sits in the copyright, so piracy takes income straight out of it. The 2023 amendment raised penalties, but enforcement is the real test, taken up in the note on intellectual property rights in India.

The buzzword gap. In the Budget speech, the orange economy heading holds a single paragraph, and it’s about AVGC labs. The Survey’s box is mostly about concerts. The label promises everything from crafts to code, but the measures so far target media and animation.

Treating the orange economy as empty branding isn’t a good idea, because the export numbers are real. Neither is treating it as a jobs machine that will absorb graduates on its own. It is wise to read it as a services sector with a skills bottleneck and a data gap, and to judge each new announcement by whether it closes one of those two.

How to study the orange economy for exams

The orange economy sits mainly in GS Paper III, with overlaps across the syllabus:

No Mains question has named the orange economy so far. The theme is tested through its neighbors: Mains 2021 GS Paper I asked “Examine the role of ‘Gig Economy’ in the process of empowerment of women in India.“, and Mains 2026 GS Paper III asked “How are startups in India promoting entrepreneurship, innovation and employment? Discuss the global and domestic challenges in their working and suggest suitable measures to overcome these challenges.” In Prelims, Indian Economy accounts for 256 of the 1,403 questions in the site’s Prelims previous year question bank, and a dated fact is the likeliest shape an orange economy question would take there.

Revise these facts until they’re automatic:

These three confusions are the ones to guard against:

The table below keeps the orange economy apart from its sibling ideas.

IdeaWhat it coversHow it relates to the orange economy
Orange (creative) economyActivities whose value rests on creative ideas and intellectual propertyThe umbrella term
Creator economyIndividuals earning from content on digital platformsA fast-growing slice of it
Gig economyShort-term, task-based work, often found through appsA way of hiring that also runs through creative work
Intangible economyInvestment in assets you can’t touch, such as software and brandsThe wider category; creative IP is one kind of intangible asset
Blue economyEconomic activity based on oceans and coastsUnrelated; only the color naming is shared
UNESCO Creative Cities NetworkCities that use creativity for urban development, a network created in 2004The same idea applied at city level

The orange economy is a small topic with a large surface, and it rewards precision more than breadth. Learn the dated facts, then use the concept in answers on services exports and youth employment, where a sourced figure like India’s $102 billion does more work than any slogan.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the orange economy in simple words?

The orange economy is the creative economy, the part of an economy where income comes from ideas protected as intellectual property rather than from physical goods. Films and video games belong to it, and so do crafts and design. The UN recognizes it as another name for the creative economy.

Why is it called the orange economy?

Its authors, Felipe Buitrago Restrepo and Iván Duque Márquez, chose orange as the color of culture and creativity. They trace the choice to a pigment used in ancient Egypt to decorate the tombs of the pharaohs. Nothing in their explanation ties it to saffron or to any national flag.

Who coined the term orange economy?

Felipe Buitrago Restrepo and Iván Duque Márquez coined it in their 2013 book The Orange Economy: An Infinite Opportunity, published by the Inter-American Development Bank. Duque later served as President of Colombia from 2018 to 2022, and Buitrago became Colombia’s culture minister.

Is the orange economy the same as the creator economy?

No. The creator economy covers individuals who earn from content on digital platforms, while the orange economy covers every activity whose value rests on creative intellectual property, including studios and craft clusters. The creator economy is one fast-growing part of the orange economy.

What has India done to promote the orange economy?

India hosted the first WAVES summit in Mumbai from 1 to 4 May 2025 and set up the Indian Institute of Creative Technologies in Mumbai as a public-private institute for AVGC-XR. The Union Budget 2026-27 proposed AVGC Content Creator Labs in 15,000 secondary schools and 500 colleges. A second WAVES summit is planned for Mumbai in 2027.

When was the International Year of Creative Economy?

The UN General Assembly declared 2021 the International Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development through resolution 74/198, adopted on 19 December 2019. It asked UNCTAD to report on the Year through its Creative Economy Outlook, in consultation with UNESCO.

How big is India’s orange economy?

The official documents don’t give one number for it. UNCTAD ranks India as the fourth-largest exporter of creative services in 2024, at 102 billion dollars. The Economic Survey 2025-26, quoting industry estimates, put the media and entertainment sector at about 2.5 trillion rupees in 2024, which is only part of the wider orange economy.

What does AVGC-XR stand for?

AVGC-XR stands for Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming, Comics and Extended Reality, the last covering immersive technology such as augmented and virtual reality. It is the Indian government’s name for the creative-technology core of the orange economy and the focus of IICT in Mumbai.

Practice Questions

Prelims

1. Consider the following statements about the orange economy: 1. The term was coined in a book published by the Inter-American Development Bank in 2013. 2. The UN General Assembly declared 2021 the International Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

Answer: (c) The IDB book appeared in 2013, and resolution 74/198 of December 2019 named 2021 the International Year.

2. The Creative Economy Outlook, which reports global trade in creative goods and services, is published by:

Answer: (b) UNCTAD publishes it, and resolution 74/198 asked UNCTAD to report on the International Year through it.

3. Consider the following statements about the Indian Institute of Creative Technologies (IICT): 1. It has been set up in Mumbai as a not-for-profit Section 8 company. 2. The Government of India holds a majority of its equity. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

Answer: (a) The Government of India holds 34% and Maharashtra 14%, while FICCI and CII hold 26% each.

4. Consider the following statements about global creative trade in 2024, as estimated by UNCTAD: 1. Exports of creative services were more than twice the exports of creative goods. 2. Creative goods made up about one-fifth of world merchandise trade. 3. India was among the five largest exporters of creative services. Which of the statements given above are correct?

Answer: (b) Creative services were $1.7 trillion against $709 billion for goods; creative goods were only 3% of merchandise trade, and India ranked fourth at $102 billion.

5. Under the Union Budget 2026-27, AVGC Content Creator Labs are to be set up in:

Answer: (b) Paragraph 60 of the Budget speech proposes labs in 15,000 secondary schools and 500 colleges through IICT Mumbai.

Mains

  1. What is meant by the ‘orange economy’? Examine India’s potential in it and the constraints that keep this potential from showing up in measured output. (15 marks, 250 words)
  2. Creative services have grown much faster than creative goods in world trade. What does this trend imply for India’s export strategy? (10 marks, 150 words)
  3. Discuss the role of intellectual property protection in the growth of creative industries, with reference to recent changes in Indian film law. (10 marks, 150 words)
  4. Critically evaluate the Union Budget 2026-27 proposal to set up AVGC Content Creator Labs in schools and colleges as a strategy for building creative-sector skills. (15 marks, 250 words)
  5. Examine the regulatory and infrastructure reforms India needs for its concert economy to become a driver of growth for tourism and urban services, as the Economic Survey 2025-26 suggests. (15 marks, 250 words)