Social capital and characteristics of economic dualism as determinants of regional resilience

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to delve into the multidimensionality and complexity of the concept of resilience by exploring two issues. Firstly, it investigates the role of social capital through the social participation and cooperatives in the economic resilience of Greek regions providing novel findings for the social resilience of the country. Secondly, it gains an in-depth understanding about the dualistic nature of resilience as it is related to a dynamic export profile of regions in tandem with one that is more traditional or less exposed to the market. This raises questions about the risk of specific regions being trapped in a protective environment providing policy implications. The measurement of the resilience capability of regions is based on both the time of exposure and the intensity of distress associating thus the business cycles of regions with their resilience capability. Additionally, the analysis studies the full period of recession and recovery, which lasted until the next crisis began (COVID-19 pandemic), allowing the investigation of the configurations formed and of the existence of different stages inside the recovery period.

KEYWORDS:

• Economic crisis
• resilience
• social capital
• dualism
• Greek regions

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editor Prof. Cooke and the two anonymous referees for their valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The contribution of human capital on regional resilience (by the share of employment with tertiary education), was also explored, but found to be insignificant eventually due to strong emigration flows (Tsiapa 2019).

2 According to the definition of Nelson (1994) sectoral dualism is defined as the per cent of the labour force in agriculture minus the share of agriculture in GDP.

3 The category of higher technology products includes the sectors 28–38, 88, and 90–91 in the 2-digit HS classification.

4 Specialisation is more likely to appear at a high aggregated spatial level (Beaudry and Schiffauerova 2009). However, the higher the spatial disaggregation, the stronger the locally rooted influence of the trend as it is not biased by other regional deviated production systems.