This paper analyses regional resilience and local economic growth patterns in Italy over the past four decades. Place-specific transient and permanent effects of aggregate employment shocks are studied. Geographical asymmetries in engineering and ecological resilience are found, providing auxiliary insights on the rooted Italian regional inequalities. The territorial impact of different crises is investigated and a direct comparison with the UK case is offered. The importance of manufacturing activities for explaining economic resilience is assessed, finding out a positive relation between the resilience of the industrial sector and the overall local economic development. Some policy implications are conclusively discussed.
This paper studies regional economic resilience by exploiting the properties of the non-linear smooth-transition autoregressive model. A testing procedure to distinguish between engineering and ecological resilience is presented, and a measurement of economic resilience is provided. Regional differences in economic resilience are explained by the presence of spatial interactions and by adopting a set of determinants like economic diversity, export performance, financial constraints, and human and social capital. An empirical investigation is conducted for analysing regional employment evolution in Italy from 1992 to 2012. Some concluding suggestions propose possible future areas of research.JEL classification: R11, R12, C34
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.
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