Cultural And Creative Sectors. Challenges And Opportunities For Romanian Economy During The Covid-19 Crisis

The beginning of 2020 brought one of the most frightening threats experienced by human civilisation: the COVID-19 pandemic. In an attempt to minimize the negative effects of this pandemic, public administrations, governments and various organizations have implemented restrictive measures - such as the so called “social distancing” – in order to reduce the intensive and quick spread of the virus. Because of this, many sectors of the economic activities all over the world are adversely affected. It is estimated that many workers will be laid off due to the reduction of the activity in the companies where they work that are highly affected by bankruptcy. This paper has as one of its main goal to identify and analyse the risks that will affect the labour marketsin the context of the COVID-19 crisis at the level of the entire economy. The paper highlights also the importance of the cultural and creative sectors. Economic agents have to better adapt to this crisis, by creating new working conditions, including teleworking conditions. During the lockdown, cultural institutions tried to maintain the connections with the public via the Internet. The pandemic brought unprecedented challenges for testing both public and private organisations capacity to adapt to these critical situations. As a direct consequence of the main measures taken in order to protect people’ health the interruption of activities had highly affected the labour markets but also the cancellation or delays of many events with the loss of important financial resources. The lockdown has led to a decrease in cultural consumption that had been affected even before this crisis as statistical data proved. We consider that one of the most affected economic sectors by the epidemic was the culturalone, which is why these sectors have to find new ways to reach the public. One of the possible reforms of the cultural and creative sectors is the development of cultural platforms that could achieve the much-needed digital transformation of these sectors.