Regional determinants of economic resilience

Abstract

The economic resilience approach recently spread among regional scientists and economic geographers has provided new challenges to empirical researchers interested in studying the overall temporary and persistent consequences of the recent crisis and, more broadly, economic shocks. One of the open issues in this literature is the identification of the determinants of resilience, that is, the factors that influence the evolutionary dynamic process of robustness and adaptability registered in particular places. The selected sample of papers in this special issue provides original contributions for answering the question about what determines regional economic resilience. The common findings of the contributions can be seen as quite robust by relying upon different measures of resilience, cases, methodologies and time periods. Three main conclusions arise from the special issue: most of the determinants of economic resilience show regularities across time and space. The factors that contribute to explain the economic performance of places in normal times are also useful for understanding the patterns observed during and after recessionary events. Policymakers can play an active role in sustaining resilient economies by addressing resources and efforts in the right policy areas without waiting for crises.

The role of national settings in the economic resilience of regions—Evidence from recessionary shocks in Europe from 1990 to 2014

“…Still, in the light of our results, the above statement does not seem applicable to resilience patterns per se. On the one hand, we can confirm that determinants of economic growth in stable times also contribute to recovery while, on the other hand, we observe that the resistance of regions is subject to contrary mechanisms, thereby suggesting a modification of Di Caro's and Fratesi's () statement. It appears plausible that this modification is related to the resistance phase because here the influence of the national setting is strongest while the above statement is derived from studies that do not take the national setting into account.…”

Investigating space‐time patterns of regional industrial resilience through a micro‐level approach: An application to the Italian wine industry

“…given these boundaries do not necessarily mirror the territorial dynamics occurring in the locality, the use of smaller subregional scales tend to generate more robust empirical results (Di Caro & Fratesi, 2018). Third, the proposed approach is specifically designed to meet the needs of policy makers to develop place-based strategies 1 It is worth noting that the term spatial regime should not be understood as a perfect synonym of "cluster"; more precisely, the term "regime" is linked to the production function underlying the spatial process.…”

Employment volatility in lagging and advanced regions: The Italian case

“…Following the seminal contributions by Martin (2012) and others, regional resilience has been investigated in many different respects: agency (Bristow & Healy, 2014); quality of government (Ezcurra & Rios, 2019); industrial diversity and regional economic structure (Brown & Greenbaun, 2017;Martin, Sunley, Gardiner, & Tyler, 2016); territorial capital (Fratesi & Perucca, 2018); embeddedness (Kitsos, Carrascal-incera, & Ortega-Argilés, 2019); metropolitan areas (Capello, Caragliu, & Fratesi, 2015;Martin & Gardiner, 2019). An interesting finding of the resilience literature is that, though differentiated, in many cases the factors determining resilience have been quite consistent with the factors determining growth prior to the crisis (Di Caro & Fratesi, 2018).…”