The Crisis and Regional Resilience in Europe: On the Importance of Urbanization and Specialization

Steven Brakman (), Harry Garretsen, Charles van Marrewijk and Charles van Marrewijk
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Charles van Marrewijk

No 4724, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Using a rich data set on the EU regions, we analyze the relevance of two possible determinants of a region’s resilience to shocks, the degree of urbanization and specialization. We take the Great Recession, the economic and financial crisis that started in 2008, as our shock and then analyze how the NUTS II EU regions differ in their resilience to the crisis in terms of unemployment and real GDP per capita. In prior research it has been well established that (EU) regions differ in their resilience to shocks but it typically remains unclear as to why regions differ in this respect. For the 2008- 2012 period, we find that the degree and nature of regional urbanization and specialization are important drivers of the resilience of EU regions. More in particular, we find that that EU regions with a relatively large share of its population in commuting areas in combination with a specialization in medium high tech industries are relatively resilient, that is were less affected by the crisis, a result that suggests a relationship with international trade.

Keywords: resilience; shock sensitivity; urbanization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R11 R12 R15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp4724.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_4724

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().