Economic Resilience and Regional Disparities: The Value Added of Spatial Analysis

The idea of regional economic resilience refers to the ability of regions to resist and recover from a given shock. The chapter offers an overview of the definitions of resilience usually found in the literature and the ways of measuring when dealing with regional economics. Actually, the concept of resilience may refer to various dimensions of regional economic performances, such as the vulnerability or the sensitivity to different types of shocks, the resistance to the impact of economic shock impacts, the way firms, workers and institutions respond or adapt to shocks and, finally, the nature of recovery. The economic debated focused mainly on the research of the characteristics that would make each region more resilient, in order to drive policy-makers in building appropriate measures and strategies aimed at reducing the vulnerability of spatial systems to shocks and enhance their ability to better respond to and recover from the crises. However, various theoretical analyses evidence also the presence of beneficial or harmful externalities driven by policies in a given region on its neighbouring regions. To account for the presence of externalities and spillover mechanisms, empirical analyses may relate to spatial econometrics approaches that enable to consider both geographical and socio-economic proximities.