Regional Employment Growth, Shocks and Regional Industrial Resilience: A Quantitative Analysis of the Danish ICT Sector

Abstract

The resilience of regional industries to economic shocks has gained a lot of attention in evolutionary economic geography recently. This paper uses a novel quantitative approach to investigate the regional industrial resilience of the Danish ICT sector to the shock following the burst of the dot-com bubble. It is shown that regions characterised by small and young ICT service companies were more adaptable and grew more than others, while diversity and urbanisation increased the sensitivity to the business cycle after the shock. Different types of resilient regions are found: adaptively resilient, rigidly resilient, entrepreneurially resilient and nonresilient regions.

The great urban techno shift: Are central neighbourhoods the next silicon valleys? Evidence from three Canadian metropolitan areas

“…As noted earlier, the focus here is on rapidly growing ‘new’ computer‐based services, which to take two examples, includes software engineers and web designers (Table ), similar to the definitions used by Moriset (), Arai et al () and Grimes et al (). As such, we exclude broader‐based definitions such as those used by Holm and Østergaard () and by the OECD to define the ICT sector and which for example include manufacturing and wholesaling. Excluding manufacturing and wholesaling allows us to focus on knowledge‐intensive services, which we would expect to respond to specific location attributes (Maurseth and Frank ).…”

Employment performance in times of crisis

“…Other conceptions of resilience have placed a slightly different focus on the persistence of social and ecological systems (pertaining to the magnitude a system can tolerate and still persist) (Adger, 2000) [1]. Empirical studies show that a cluster's vulnerability to external shocks and its ability to adapt depends on the capabilities as well as the network interactions of individual firms (Holm and Ostergaard, 2013;Wrobel, 2013). This study draws on related conceptual and empirical work that uses employment as a central variable of cluster evolution (Menzel and Fornahl, 2010) and the economic resilience of regional clusters (Wrobel, 2013).…”

“…At the same time, this provides us with the rare opportunity to extend the examination of regional clusters to its constituent components, which is of particular importance given that a cluster's response to an external shock is defined by firms (Holm and Ostergaard, 2013;Martin and Sunley, 2011;Menzel and Fornahl, 2010;Wrobel, 2013). An important starting point of this paper is that the antecedents of economic resilience are located at multiple levels of analysis.…”

“…Recent empirical studies suggest that the diversity of the economic structure of a cluster promotes economic resilience (Holm and Ostergaard, 2013;Wrobel, 2013). We thus assume that urbanization economies are associated with employment growth in competence-destroying environments.…”

‘One for all and all for one’: Cluster, employment, and the global economic crisis. Evidence from the German mechanical engineering industry

“…To these developments, the cluster in Prato had no adequate strategic response. So the cluster was locked in its once very successful 'excessive fragmentation' and experienced a degeneration of cluster structures subsequently (Harrison 1997). In this regard, regional variation in the success of clusters also suggests that the inner structure of a cluster is an important factor, for example when a cluster is build around a few focal actors rather than many and, like in the case of the German coal, iron, and steel industry of the Ruhrgebiet, generates considerable power asymmetries within the cluster (Friedrich 1992;Grabher 1993).…”