Economic resilience in Great Britain: an empirical analysis at the local authority district level

The 2008 recession has affected the UK with a drop in employment and economic output. Within the country, the crisis impact was far from homogenous, with some areas showing significant resilience performance and improving their labour market indicators whilst others lost thousands of jobs. This chapter focuses on the differential resilience performance of local authority districts in Great Britain and examines what factors lie behind the ability of a place to mitigate the negative effects of a recession. In particular, it uses quantitative methods to assess the impact of several factors on the labour market performance before and after the crisis. The findings suggest that past performance, skills and demographics are significant determinants of a place’s resilience performance and call for policies that will produce, retain and attract skilled individuals, as well as rethinking growth policies to encompass resilience building actions.