The impact of the creative industries and digitalization on regional resilience and productive entrepreneurship

This study investigates the impact of the creative industries on regional resilience and productive entrepreneurship. We control for the localized effects of digitalization in this relationship. We do so by linking the regional resilience theory with the literature on the creative industries, digitalization and productive entrepreneurship. The unit of our analysis is the European Union’s regions (from the 2008 Great Recession crisis to the 2015 recovery period). We empirically tested our framework in the context of the European Union with datasets from Eurostat Regional Statistics and the European Social Survey (ESS). Our analysis is focused on the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) 3 regions, which includes 1397 industry performance observations from 314 NUTS-3 regions and 11 European countries (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, and Slovakia) for the period 2008–2015. Our findings demonstrate that regions with a higher share of employment in the creative industries are more likely to withstand a short-term economic shock than regions with a lower share of employment in the creative industries. Our results also indicate the importance of digitalization in the period of recovery from crises, and demonstrate that the creative industries play an important part in this process. This study offers a number of policy implications.