Economic Performance and Resilience in Romania: Balancing Traditional and Creative Class Policy Approaches

In a globalized world cities are increasingly confronted with global shocks. In this context cities need to adopt strategies to increase their economic performance and resilience. One strategy that has become increasingly popular is represented by policies designed to attract the creative class, which are arguably an improvement compared to more traditional policy approaches. However, authors have warned that an excessive focus on attracting the creative class can be detrimental if authorities ignore the importance of historical paths and of traditional variables responsible for economic growth, especially in the case of coordinated economies. As such, in the present paper we investigate the complementarity between the creative input variables and their traditional equivalents in terms of the extent to which they predict economic development and economic resilience. In doing so we focus on the case of Romania, a former communist country, whit a historically more centralized and coordinated economy. The findings highlight the complementarity of the two policy approaches, as traditional variables are correlated with the number of jobs and the income level at the level of municipalities, while the concentration of creative workers is strongly correlated with labour productivity. However, neither traditional nor creative input variables have an impact on the resistance or recovery of Romanian municipalities in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis.