Economic Crisis And The Resilience Of Regions

The economic crisis of 2008-9 heralded the most severe economic downturn in the history of the European Union. Yet not all regions experienced economic decline and rates of recovery have varied greatly. This has raised new questions about what factors influence the economic resilience of regions. This book presents the results of an Applied Research Project conducted within the ESPON 2013 Programme and provides a detailed analysis of what made some European regions more resilient to the crisis than others.

Leading researchers on economic resilience from economic geography, economic history and organizational studies discuss recent approaches to better understand the impact of structures, processes, agency, governance and multilevel settings on economic resilience.

Resilience has emerged as a recurrent notion to explain how territorial socio-economic systems adapt successfully (or not) to negative events. In this book, the authors use resilience as a bridging notion to connect different types of theoretical and empirical approaches to help understand the impacts of economic turbulence at the system and actor levels. The book provides a unique overview of the financial crisis and the important dimension of innovation dynamics for regional resilience. It also offers an engaging debate as to how regional resilience can be improved and explores the social aspects of vulnerability, resilience and innovation.

This Handbook provides a collection of high quality contributions on the state of the art in current debates around the concept of regional economic resilience. It provides critical contributions from leading authors in the field, and captures both key theoretical debates around the meaning of resilience, its conceptual framing and utility, as well as empirical interrogation of its key determinants in different international contexts.

The term “resilience” originated in environmental studies and describes one’s biological capacity to adapt and thrive under adverse environmental conditions. Regional economic resilience is defined as the capacity of a territory’s economy to resist and/or recover quickly from external shocks, often even improving on its prior situation (before the shock). The contributions in this book analyse different channels related to processes of mitigation (resistance–recovery) and adaptive resilience (reorientation–renewal), in a wide variety of geographical settings and scales. While the different chapters include relevant methodological advances in this literature, they also obtain relevant results from a policy perspective. Moreover, the wide spectrum of topics and analyses among the contributions in this book extend the current framework, to analyse regional economic resilience, from the intersection of several disciplines involving geographers, economists and demographers, as well as environmental scientists.

Economic and financial crises have brought the rise of unemployment, reduction of economic growth and emergence of global imbalances and tensions as countries and regions have suffered the effects of a variety of internal and external shocks. In this context of constant disruption, the scientific community has struggled to provide satisfactory answers to current economic challenges within standard frameworks. Focusing on the interconnections between innovation and resilience, this edited book contributes to a better understanding of how the crisis affects innovation and the capacity of territories to adapt and evolve. It offers both theoretical and empirical contributions that debate the notions of resilience in regional and urban contexts and serve as case studies related to innovation strategies and territorial clusters.

Interdisciplinary in its approach, with expert contributors from diverse backgrounds, Resilience and Regional Development brings to light the significance of multiple dimensions of resilience and its implications for the economy.