The Role of Creative Industries in the EU Subnational Regions Economic Complexity Dynamics

The study uses the theory of economic complexity and relatedness to predict changes in economic specialization structure of the EU subnational regions. Creative and cultural industries (CCI), the type of economic activity in which development is most strongly tied to the transfer of non-codified knowledge is in the focus of this study. Data on regional employment is used to assess the geography of creative and cultural industries at the period of data relevance (2019), to calculate indicators of economic complexity and relatedness, to construct an occupation space and to calculate the transition potential for each region, which is then mapped. The regions that are most likely to increase their specialization in CCI in the next 2-3 years have been identified, and the results have been interpreted in accordance with the existing research. The main result of the work is the confirmation of the hypothesis about the correlation between the level of economic complexity of the regions and their chances of developing specialization in cultural and creative industries. The work combines a modern research approach and a challenging research area. The task of forecasting changes in regional specialization in the near future, which is rare for geographical science, has been completed, which is consistent with the European Smart Specialization Strategy (S3), that underlies the regional policy of the European Union in the 2020s.