This text deliberates and relates the concepts of culture, human rights and cultural policies within the idea of cultural development. It considers the development as a set of activities of transformation of social and environmental reality in interface with the cultural dimension. It describes the concept of creative economy by relating it to new forms of post-industrial production and makes an exercise to define and measure social categories (creative classes) that work in creative activities in Brazil for the period 20022015. Therefore, it shows the dynamics and the participation of the creative economy and the culture economy in the Brazilian development processes. The analysis of the way that creative classes in Brazil are organized carried out in this article, took as parameter the classification inspired by the study of Richard Florida and remodeled for the Brazilian reality from the data of the PNAD and the official professional classifications of the IBGE. It shows that the creative class has grown significantly in its quota, from 10 million people in 2002 to 15 million in 2015, registering significant variations in the contingent of the professional groups that involve it (hyper creative center, hyper creative and creative professionals, with increases of 37%, 51% and 23%, respectively). Although it is a small contingent compared to the United States, for example, whose percentage reaches 30% of the workforce of that country, the results obtained in this study point to a not insignificant increment of the creative economy in the country.