Regional economic resilience: insights from five crises

ABSTRACT

We examine the association between industrial structure and regional economic resilience during five different crises in Czechia, focusing on the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russo-Ukrainian war. The effects of economic diversity, sectoral structure, factor intensity of production, and firm size structure on regional resistance were tested. We found that regional patterns of resistance varied significantly from one crisis to another. There were only two major cases where a positive association with regional resistance turned into a negative from one shock to another: public services that absorbed unemployment during the Great Recession and shed labour in the austerity crisis, and capital-intensive industries that exhibited a positive statistical effect on regional resistance during the transitionary shock and the Great Recession, while their contribution to regional labour markets during the Covid-19 pandemic and the War was negative.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience
• industrial structure
• crises comparison

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministerstvo Školství, Mládeže a Tělovýchovy [Grant Number CZ.02.2.69/0.0/0.0/19_073/0016939].