Understanding of resilience in the context of regional development using composite index approach: the case of European Union NUTS-2 regions

Abstract

Economies have always been prone to different kinds of exogenous shocks, which can destabilize the path and pattern of regional economic growth. Regional economy perturbed by a shock may move onto a new growth path by re-establishing economic linkages, both internally and with other regions. The question why one region is more vulnerable to economic shock than other, impelled to analyze notion of resilience in a regional development context. Despite own limitations of quantitative methods, several approaches in the form of composite indices (CIs) have been proposed by the European Union (EU) and the other institutions. The aim of this paper is to throw light on some of the underlying aspects of regional resilience and provide an overview of a notion as well as analysis of research studies on constructing the territorial CIs. The main results of the paper are overview and comparison of regional resilience literature and empirics of existing CIs that lead to measuring the EU NUTS-2 regions resilience based on constructing own index. CIs construction includes several steps that have to be made and corresponding methods have to be chosen. Primarily, selection of sub-indicators, normalizing methods, weighting schemes and aggregation formulas are fundamental. ARTICLE HISTORY

Quality of government and regional resilience in the European Union. Evidence from the Great Recession

“…Although the number of papers on regional resilience has significantly grown in recent years, there is not an unanimous agreement about how to measure this concept and different approaches have been applied in the literature (Doran & Fingleton, ; Martin & Sunley, ). The majority of authors use univariate indices capturing changes in the level of economic activity (e.g., Crescenzi, Luca, & Milio, ; Fingleton, Garretsen, & Martin, ; Martin, ), even though there are also studies based on the information provided by composite indicators (e.g., Rizzi, Graziano, & Dallara, ; Staníčková & Melecký, ). Against this background, and taking into account the nature of our study, we resort to a widely used measure of regional resistance to recessionary shocks (Giannakis & Bruggeman, ; Lagravinese, ; Martin, Sunley, Gardiner, & Tyler, ): where Δ E i is the change in the employment rate in region i during the crisis period 2008–2013 (see Figure A1 in the online Appendix for further details).…”

In Search of Concerted Strategies for Competitive and Resilient Regions

“…A study of regional resilience may bring about important information on the key problematic issues in the region (and thus in the country) on the one hand, and its development potential on the other. In recent years, after the 2007–09 period of economic recession the notion of resilience has rapidly become a part of the conceptual and analytical object of regional-economic studies, in line with the rising importance of regions as an economic engine, to be managed in decision-making processes and public policies (Stanickova and Melecký 2018 ). The achievement of resilience after an external shock is of course influenced by a multiplicity of factors, including geographic location, the initial and prevailing social and economic situation, the level and quality of infrastructure, density of population, social capital, cultural habits, environmental conditions, institutional frameworks, and many other factors (Borsekova et al 2018 ).…”

“…Regional competitiveness is based on the potential of a region to generate economic advantages through a superior productivity performance, to attract highly educated and creative manpower, to attract new or innovative firms with stable or rising market shares, and to maintain attractive or increasing standards of living for all actors involved (see for example Bristow 2005 , Cooke 2000 , 2004 , Florida 2002 , Poot 2000 ). Competitiveness also means to be able to withstand unexpected external shocks, and thus reflects also to the ability of a regional economy to absorb or overcome an internal or external economic perturbation (Stanickova and Melecky 2018 ).…”

The Illusion of Urbanization: Impact of Administrative Reform on Communities’ Resilience

“…At the center of the most recent research on resilience we find studies analyzing the capacity of regions to adapt more adequately to the consequences of the economic crisis. Growing interest regarding this topic is largely due to the exceptional severity of the economic crisis and the spatial heterogeneity of its impacts (Giannakis and Bruggeman 2017; Stanícková and Melecký 2018). Considering the discourse on rural resilience, personal narratives presented in the paper of Anthopoulou, Kaberis, and Petrou (2017) reveal that the crisis experienced in the Greek countryside strengthened the image of rural life as an idyllic place to remain in or return to.…”