Creative economy is the term used to describe the economy of the 21st century. It represents a fusion of creativity and culture with the economy on a global scale, while in big part including the so-called symbolic production and usage of ICT. Neither creativity nor economics are new terms, but in their coexistence they spawned a certain nature and relationship which generates outstanding values, both material and non-material. The goal of this graduate thesis is to study the impact of creative industries on the economic development of each country by defining the basic terms and processing the available data on mapping of cultural and creative industries of the surveyed countries. The main axis of creative economy are creative industries which originated from the combination of creative arts and cultural industries. Creative industries are the part of the so-called „new capitalism“, which promotes the importance of knowledge and intellectual property. While they cannot be sorted in any of the industrial sectors of today, their products and processes are existant in all of them. By generating the means of creative industries in certain local areas, the image of the cities and regions themselves becomes creative as they adopt the characteristics of creative cities and regions. By following the european and global trends, one can notice the development of creative industries in Republic of Croatia, which is accompanied by the first Mapping of creative and cultural industries in Republic of Croatia from the year 2015. The Republic of Croatia entered the European Union in 2013, and by doing so, it accepted its economic development programs and strategies. In that spirit, during the year 2016, the Croatian government brought up a document called Smart specialization strategy for the period from 2016 to 2020 and adopted an action plan for the implementaion of the aformentioned document in current and upcoming year which acts as part of the framework of the Europe 2020 strategy, developed by the Europan Union. By using the Smart specialization strategy, there comes an incentive for the development of creative industries which connects the real sector with the scientific sector, promoted in Croatia by the popularization simposiums, eg. Creative treasury by Faculty of Economics in Osijek.