Regional economic resilience: the experience of the Italian local labor systems (original) (raw)
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This paper analyses regional resilience and local economic growth patterns in Italy over the past four decades. Place-specific transient and permanent effects of aggregate employment shocks are studied. Geographical asymmetries in engineering and ecological resilience are found, providing auxiliary insights on the rooted Italian regional inequalities. The territorial impact of different crises is investigated and a direct comparison with the UK case is offered. The importance of manufacturing activities for explaining economic resilience is assessed, finding out a positive relation between the resilience of the industrial sector and the overall local economic development. Some policy implications are conclusively discussed.
Testing and Explaining Economic Resilience with an Application to Italian Regions
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2014
This paper studies regional economic resilience by exploiting the properties of the nonlinear smooth-transition autoregressive model. A testing procedure to distinguish between engineering and ecological resilience is presented, and a measurement of economic resilience is provided. Regional differences in economic resilience are explained by the presence of spatial interactions and by adopting a set of determinants like economic diversity, export performance, financial constraints, and human and social capital. An empirical investigation is conducted for analysing regional employment evolution in Italy from 1992 to 2012. Some concluding suggestions propose possible future areas of research.
This paper proposes a new and quite flexible testing procedure for distinguishing between engineering and ecological resilience, by fully exploiting the properties of the non-linear smooth-transition autoregressive (STAR) model. A two-steps' empirical strategy is adopted for measuring, comparing and explaining the ecological resilience of regional economies to aggregate business cycle's variations in a multi-regime environment. The relevance of evolutionary patterns for analysing regional resilience is deeply discussed. The empirical investigation is conducted for the Italian case, by looking at the dynamic of regional employment growth over the period 1992-2012. Differences in regional resilience among Italian regions are explained by the concentration of manufacturing activities, highly productive regional exports, financial constraints, human and social capital. Some concluding suggestions introduce possible future areas of research in line with the more recent literature on this topic.
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The Italian Geography of Regional Resilience: The Role of Cooperative Firms
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We investigate the economic resilience of the Italian regions between 2008 and 2019. We then calculate some indices of resistance as well as recovery for both real GDP per capita and employment. We show that during (and after) recessions such indices follow different patterns and the Southern regions perform worse than the rest of the country. Then we try to detect if and how the composition of employment relates to regional resilience. We show that the size of the cooperative employment improves the overall resilience of regional employment, especially during recoveries. We also show and explain that this is not the case with cooperative added value as related to the resilience of regional GDP. Overall, the cooperative movement seems to positively contribute to the resilience of regional economies, supporting an inclusive growth especially through the employment channel.
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In the European literature on the regional and local development, the concept of resilience has progressively gained momentum, eventually overcoming that of competitiveness and posing a critical challenge for the future of territorial studies and the territorialisation of the policy discourse. In the current economic turmoil, the success of an urban and regional economy relies more and more on its capacity to react to sudden shocks in a positive and evolutionary perspective, i.e., in its resilience. Nevertheless, as a recent analysis of the employment dynamics of Italian metro-regions in the period before and after 2008 has demonstrated that the existing taxonomies may be distant from reality and hardly communicable. The paper proposes a taxonomy of regional resilience based on the consideration of the region’s capacity of both improving its employment rate during the pre-crisis period and overcoming the concurrent performance of the nation. Via a shift-share analysis of the employm...
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This article attempts to isolate the structural characteristics that affect the resilience of a regional economy. It focuses on the role played by related/unrelated variety and differentiated knowledge bases as drivers for regional resilience and originally explores their interdependences. Italy is the empirical setting, and Italian local labour systems the unit of analysis. Regional resilience is measured as growth of the employment rate after the Great Recession that began in 2008. Results confirm the importance of related variety and of differentiated knowledge bases as drivers for regional resilience. We found support of the creative capacity of culture argument, providing evidence that a moderate concentration in symbolic knowledge-based economic activities contributes to resilience. Synthetic and analytical knowledge-based activities provide positive and no support to regional resilience, respectively. Finally, the relatedness of the symbolic knowledge-based activities increases regional economic resilience. Some policy implications are then derived from these findings.
To be (or not to be) resilient over time: facts and causes
The Annals of Regional Science, 2017
This study provides novel evidence on the resilience of regional labour markets in Italy by applying the nonlinear smooth transition autoregressive modelling approach to newly released data on total, female and industrial employment. Five main conclusions derive from the empirical results. The concept of ecological resilience describes regional evolution in Italy over the past 40 years. Spatial differences in resilience result significant across Italian regions. Female employment registers low resilience dynamics and increasing vulnerability during shocks. Since the first half of nineties national and international destabilizing events contributed to amplify regional divergences. The uneven evolution and performance of the manufacturing sector across Italy provides some explanations on the asymmetric geographical distribution of resilience in this country. The concluding section summarizes the main findings of the work and proposes future avenues of research. JEL Classification R11 • R12 • C34 1 Introduction Gathering momentum since the start of the Great Recession in 2007-2008, both the analysis of the spatial effects of aggregate economic shocks and the study of the impact of recessionary events on the developmental path of particular places have attracted