Towards an Evolutionary Perspective on Regional Resilience

Determinants of regional economic resilience and post-crisis growth path performance: insights from Canada

This article breaks down the distributional analysis of firm growth rates to the domain of regions. Extreme growth events, i.e., turbulence at the level of firms, are conceptualized as an indicator of competitive regional environments which enable processes like structural adaptation or technological re-orientation. This provides a micro-funded empirical framework to operationalize the evolutionary dimension of regional resilience. Therefore, the flexible Asymmetric Exponential Power density is fitted to firm data for each German region during the years of economic downturn (2008–2010). Results show that firm-level turbulence is more pronounced in regions with higher aggregate growth performance, with a highly qualified workforce and with more unrelated variety in the industrial portfolio.

Purpose This paper aims to evaluate the role of cluster strength on regional resilience. Previous literature shows that the industrial composition of a region, measured with indicators of its specialization, diversity and related and unrelated variety, is a crucial determinant of resilience. In this paper, the authors aggregate cluster-level data into several indicators of regional cluster strength to proxy for different aspects of the cluster portfolio of a region. Design/methodology/approach In particular, the authors consider the role of the presence of strong clusters in a regional economy as well as the mix of clusters in which the region has main relevance. On the one hand, the authors assume that the agglomeration forces arising in regions specialized in certain clusters could mitigate the effect of recessions. However, these strong industrial linkages may increase the diffusion of the economic shock from one industry to the rest. To check which of these two forces dominates, the authors consider the resilience of the US states over the Great Recession period and use a cluster definition that classifies traded industries into 51 clusters. Findings This study’s findings suggest that the presence of a portfolio of strong clusters allows mitigating economic shocks. Practical implications Resilience mechanisms must be identified in the face of future economic shocks or pandemics like COVID-19. Originality/value Some research works have demonstrated that strong clusters help make other clusters resilient. However, the effects they can have on the entire region have not been analyzed, as in this study.

Analysis of regional resilience network from the perspective of relational and dynamic equilibrium

The Application of Resilience Concept in the Regional Development Context

Regional resilience has been criticized in the literature for being fuzzy. Based on that criticism one could expect it to suffer from conceptual stretching, that is that authors mean different things when they write about regional resilience. In this paper for the first time, a bibliometric analysis is presented to tackle the issue of fuzziness and stretching concerning regional resilience. With the help of that analysis, we identified three groups of research on regional resilience, urban ecology and policies (red), economic dynamics and regional evolutionary perspectives (green) and crisis management and engineering/modelling (blue). We also identified the key papers cited in these groups. In a second step, our qualitative analysis reveals that the divide between the red and green groups is not large and that the blue group is relatively isolated. Overall, the concept of regional resilience seems to be less stretched than we expected on the basis of the criticism expressed in the literature.

The resilience concept refers to the capacity of regions to deal with shocks. The concept, however, remains ambiguous and under-formalized. This chapter develops a conceptual evolutionary framework for regional resilience that distinguishes three dimensions of resilience: (1) the sensitivity to a shock; (2) the recovery from a shock; and, above all (3) the ability to transform and create new growth paths. It discusses the main factors that affect each of these resilience dimensions: the industrial and technological structure of regions, their network structure, and their institutional setting. In doing so, the chapter sheds light on the links between regional resilience and regional competitiveness.

ABSTRACTRegional resilience has been criticized in the literature for being fuzzy. Based on that criticism one could expect it to suffer from conceptual stretching, that is that authors mean different things when they write about regional resilience. In this paper for the first time, a bibliometric analysis is presented to tackle the issue of fuzziness and stretching concerning regional resilience. With the help of that analysis, we identified three groups of research on regional resilience, urban ecology and policies (red), economic dynamics and regional evolutionary perspectives (green) and crisis management and engineering/modelling (blue). We also identified the key papers cited in these groups. In a second step, our qualitative analysis reveals that the divide between the red and green groups is not large and that the blue group is relatively isolated. Overall, the concept of regional resilience seems to be less stretched than we expected on the basis of the criticism expressed in the literature.

The complex ecological network’s resilience of the Wuhan metropolitan area

Business cycle research received renewed attention in the run-up to, and in the aftermath of, the Great Recession. This paper focuses on the concept of regional economic resilience as an applied field of business cycle research. The resilience of the Western Cape regional economy is analysed by assessing the impact of the 2009 recession. Being one of the leading provincial economies of South Africa, the research considers the extent to which the 2009 recession impacted the Western Cape's long-term economic growth path. The latest research techniques in assessing economic resilience are applied, with a focus on quantifying the region's resistance to, and recoverability from, the 2009 recession. While the national and provincial contexts receive attention, the focus is on the district economies of the Western Cape. The drivers of economic resilience are decomposed into two key forces, namely industry mix and regional competitiveness, using a shift-share analysis. Longer term structural change is also considered. The paper finds that the Eden and Overberg district economies’ growth paths, and the way in which these regions absorbed the recession impact, may provide policymakers with pointers on how to revive the Western Cape's growth path, which took a knock with the 2009 recession.

ABSTRACTRegional resilience to displacements. Regional Studies. This paper contributes to knowledge about regional resilience to displacement and examines the extent to which the characteristics of the (1) regional closures, (2) individuals in a region, (3) regional industry, (4) regional economy and (5) regional attractiveness influence the re-employment of displaced employees. Regions where the average size of establishment closures is large or the regional displacement rate is high exhibit increased resilience in terms of re-employing displaced employees in the same region. Unrelated and related industrial variety are positively related to resilience to displacement in regions with low re-employment capacities, whereas there is some evidence that regional attractiveness is positively related to resilience in regions with a good ability to re-employ displaced employees in the same region.

ABSTRACTEconomies 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.

The article explains the necessity to adapt the theory of regional resilience in Russia’s domestic science, considering the existing Western concepts, and determines the prerequisites for the formation of the theory of resilience of regional economic systems in Russian science. The definitions of the concept of “resilience” from different fields of knowledge and their interpretation in the field of regional economy and economic geography are given. The conceptual bases of evolutionary accounting of regional economic stability and adaptation are also considered, and the basic properties and factors influencing regional stability are determined. The notion of “resilience” is very important for understanding the process and models of uneven regional development, but the critically broad interpretation of this concept is a significant obstacle in building theoretical foundations and developing appropriate public policy measures. The authors identify the main factors affecting the resilience of the regional economic system: the ability of the region’s economy to adapt to changing economic conditions and to overcome crisis recessions; the availability of modern infrastructure, skilled personnel and business entities; a diversified economy; a strong system of innovation and research; a stable financial system; demographic trends; regional policy etc. The authors conclude that there is no single equilibrium state of the economy: crisis and shock situations shift the economy from its equilibrium path, after which it either restores its former growth path, or goes to the underlying trajectory or to an improved path of growth.

In this chapter we will discuss how the mechanisms and drivers of regional economic resilience can be theorised using evolutionary approaches in economic geography. We focus on evolutionary approaches that draw from three main theoretical frameworks: Generalised Darwinism, Complexity Theory, and Path Dependency. We will review each of the three frameworks with regard to their understanding of regional economic resilience, with particular attention to their treatment of the roles of agency, institutions and multi-scalar processes. We conclude that the Path Dependency approach – so far relatively neglected in debates on regional resilience – offers the greatest theoretical insight into these interrelated domains and provides the basis for a more comprehensive evolutionary resilience research agenda.

In this paper, we review the different definitions of resilience and their potential application in explaining the long-term development of urban and regional economies. We reject equilibrist versions of resilience and argue instead that we should seek an understanding of the concept from an evolutionary perspective. After discussing a number of such perspectives, we focus on the adaptive cycle model from panarchy theory to generate testable hypotheses concerning urban and regional resilience. Two case study city-regional economies are used to explore this model. We conclude that the evolutionary adaptive cycle model, though not without problems, warrants further study as a framework for analysing regional economic resilience.