Are Slovak Regions Ready for Crises? Analysis of Their Socio-economic Resilience

Socio-economic and political systems are becoming increasingly unstable under the influence of various recent global events. The resilience of territorial units and their ability to respond to new challenges is significantly different in both the international and national context. In the presented work, we try to quantify the level of socio-economic resilience of Slovak regions and districts, while evaluating its state in time sections (2010 and 2020) capturing two crisis periods: the global economic and financial crisis and the onset of the crisis associated with the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. We use a set of indicators that reflect the demographic, economic, knowledge society, social and public-administrative context of this resilience, which define the degree of preparedness for (ability to react to) real or potential socio-economic crises. For this purpose, a multi-criteria evaluation method is used, quantifying the level of socio-economic resilience of the analysed territorial units. They are divided into five groups using the clustering method (with very high, high, medium, low and very low levels of resistance). It turns out that during the study decade there were no major changes in the socio-economic resilience of individual regions and districts and that territorial units concentrated in the western half of Slovakia and in the hinterland of large cities are much better prepared for socio-economic crises, in contrast to the limited ability to react in peripheral areas located at the south of central Slovakia and the east of the country.