The Catalysts Of The Creative Economy In Romania: An Empirical Analysis

The creative and cultural industries represent an economic engine capable to generate economic development, job creation, economic development for other sectors, social inclusion, and also to promote traditions and social identity. Thus the benefits brought by the development of the creative economy relate to economic, social and environmental impacts. Richard Florida is a well-known contributor to the creative economy’s literature, whose most important findings relate to the determinants of the creative economy’s development, including the theory of the 3T, and later of the 4T; these T’s comprise technology, talent, tolerance and territory as factors influencing the development of the creative cities, the creative economy being considered to be developing mostly in the urban areas. During the last years, there were several studies aiming to find out which are the influencing factors of the creative economy’s development, so numerous academics tried to test Richard Florida’s well knows theories. Our paper will briefly present some of these studies, but our aim is to reveal the main influence factors on the Romanian creative economy, selecting seven cities relevant as creative cities. Our hypothesis is that the number of students enrolled in bachelor studies, the young population and the local public expenditure on cultural activities, are correlated with the dimension of the local creative economies. So, we analysed the creative economies of the seven Romanian cities, in terms of number of employees and recorded turnover, and also five independent variables regarding the factors mentioned above, and so we applied the regression ANOVA method, in order to test if there exists any correlation between the selected variables.