Abstract
This paper focuses on the response of Italian inner areas to the Great Recession. Inner areas represent the majority of the Italian territory and are very heterogeneous in terms of (unstable) growth trajectories and industrial composition. One key issue that has partially hindered a thorough empirical analysis of the development paths of these areas so far, is defining these inner areas. To this aim, we adopt the recent classification proposed by the National Strategy for Inner Areas (2014), which identified six categories based on the travel distance from service provision centers. Our purpose is to analyze the potential structural change of inner vs non-inner areas in the face of the 2007–2008 economic crisis, assessing their adaptive capacity to the recessionary disturbance and the factors underlying their industrial composition change. We found that urban poles and inner areas had different abilities to re-adapt their local industrial compositions in response to the economic crisis with obvious effects on their future resilience.
Highlights
The body of academic contributions dealing with local and regional development has recently broadened to study the concept of regional resilience
It considers the return to the pre-shock equilibrium state or path, without saying anything about the capacity of an economic system to adapt or move to a better development path than before the shock [9]
If the “to what” is an economic crisis, as in our case, to build our analytical framework we can fruitfully rely on the four interrelated dimensions identified by Martin [1] to conceptualize the notion of resilience precisely in relation to recessionary or other such shocks, which we found very salient to our purpose
Summary
The body of academic contributions dealing with local and regional development has recently broadened to study the concept of regional resilience (i.e., how different regions respond and adapt to a wide array of external shocks). Many different notions of resilience have been proposed in recent years, resilience, broadly speaking, is meant as the ability of a socio-economic system to recover from a shock or disruption [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8] This concept has been fine-tuned, and three main interpretations of this ability to recover are found in the literature [1,9,10]. Following Boschma [4], resilience, meant as the capacity of a region to sustain long-run development, is regarded as important as the capacity of a region to respond positively to short-term shocks This interpretation focuses on the long-term evolution of regions and their abilities to adapt and reconfigure their industrial and institutional structures. Shocks “are often closely intertwined with the unfolding of broader, longer run and slow-burn processes of change” [12] (p. 5)
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