Putting adaptive resilience to work: measuring regional re-orientation using a matching model

This chapter focuses on how to empirically observe the re-orientation dimension of resilience and test its relationship to a region’s ability to resist or recover from a shock. The chapter defines re-orientation as the reallocation over time of productive resources across regions and industries, and develops a tool for its measurement which is based on a region’s ability to match unemployed workers with firms with job vacancies. Using the example of the Netherlands, the analysis shows that re-orientation is an essential feature of the adaptation process of a regional economy and that under shocks and also episodes of employment growth, regions undergo more re-orientation than they normally do. It also finds that the recovery of regions is affected by the region’s options for re-orientation as shaped by its inter-sectoral and inter-regional labour mobility.