Abstract
The creative economy has attracted increasing attention from academia and policymakers for more than two decades. However, despite the flourishing literature on this topic, its complex connection with development and its role in strengthening resilience are yet to be properly examined. The paper addresses this issue by investigating how different cities in Romania, with a different intensity of creative industries, have managed to resist and to recover from the aftermath of the Great Recession. Our findings reveal that, as a whole, creative industries strengthen urban resistance against a recession, but do not necessarily fasten urban recovery. As our results suggest, this might be due to the asymmetrical impact across different groups of creative industries. Besides a creative economy proliferation, other factors are also identified as significant resilience drivers. Whilst a better access to healthcare services, higher local investments and a higher decentralization of local budgets appear to enhance the cities’ resistance, higher shares of agriculture and finance, as well as a higher income per capita appear to correlate with a faster urban recovery.
Highlights
Since its first development, two decades ago (Howkins, 2001), the creative economy has generated interest for an increasing number of specialists from various fields, as well as from world-known organizations, concerned with its potential in promoting growth, prosperity and well-being in regional and national economies (United Nations, 2018a, 2010, 2008; UNESCO, 2013; Dovey and Pra, 2016)
At the European Union level, for example, several financing instruments were applied for sustaining the cultural and creative sector (Mazilu, 2018, pp. 295-297), among which the Creative Europe programme has received a crucial role. ese measures came as a recognition of the importance of the creative economy’s place within the European economy, which accounts for 3.8% of the total employment (Eurostat, 2018), while the cultural enterprises, representing 5% of the total number of firms in the non-financial business economy, generated 192 billion EUR of added value (Eurostat, 2016)
Considering previous studies that offer clues on the potential positive impact of the creative economy on resilience (Buheji, 2019; Pra, 2015) and the ability of the sector ‘to sail against the tide’ (Fontainha and Lazzaro, 2019), our research explores the relation between creative industries and the resistance and recovery of the cities, at the level of Romania
Summary
Two decades ago (Howkins, 2001), the creative economy has generated interest for an increasing number of specialists from various fields (economics, business and management, law, policy studies, organization studies, geography, sociology and psychology etc.), as well as from world-known organizations, concerned with its potential in promoting growth, prosperity and well-being in regional and national economies (United Nations, 2018a, 2010, 2008; UNESCO, 2013; Dovey and Pra , 2016). E proliferation of theoretical and empirical studies on this topic was accompanied by the rising awareness of national and supranational groups, which elaborated policies and strategies with the purpose of supporting the creative sector. In this regard, at the European Union level, for example, several financing instruments were applied for sustaining the cultural and creative sector
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