This Handbook provides a collection of high quality contributions on the state of the art in current debates around the concept of regional economic resilience. It provides critical contributions from leading authors in the field, and captures both key theoretical debates around the meaning of resilience, its conceptual framing and utility, as well as empirical interrogation of its key determinants in different international contexts.

Coping with Adversity addresses the question of why some metropolitan-area regional economies are resilient in the face of economic shocks and chronic distress while others are not. It is particularly concerned with what public policies make a difference in whether a region is resilient. The authors employ a wide range of techniques to examine the experience of all metropolitan area economies from 1978–2014. They then look closely at six American metropolitan areas to determine what strategies were employed, which of these contributed to regional economic resilience, and which did not. Charlotte, North Carolina, Seattle, Washington, and Grand Forks, North Dakota, are cases of economic resilience, while Cleveland, Ohio, Hartford, Connecticut, and Detroit, Michigan, are cases of economic nonresilience. The six case studies include hard data on employment, production, and demographics, as well as material on public policies and actions. The authors conclude that there is little that can done in the short term to counter economic shocks; most regions simply rebound naturally after a relatively short period of time. However, they do find that many regions have successfully emerged from periods of prolonged economic distress and that there are policies that can be applied to help them do so. Coping with Adversity will be important reading for all those concerned with local and regional economic development, including public officials, urban planners, and economic developers.

The term “resilience” originated in environmental studies and describes one’s biological capacity to adapt and thrive under adverse environmental conditions. Regional economic resilience is defined as the capacity of a territory’s economy to resist and/or recover quickly from external shocks, often even improving on its prior situation (before the shock). The contributions in this book analyse different channels related to processes of mitigation (resistance–recovery) and adaptive resilience (reorientation–renewal), in a wide variety of geographical settings and scales. While the different chapters include relevant methodological advances in this literature, they also obtain relevant results from a policy perspective. Moreover, the wide spectrum of topics and analyses among the contributions in this book extend the current framework, to analyse regional economic resilience, from the intersection of several disciplines involving geographers, economists and demographers, as well as environmental scientists.

Resilience has emerged as a recurrent notion to explain how territorial socio-economic systems adapt successfully (or not) to negative events. In this book, the authors use resilience as a bridging notion to connect different types of theoretical and empirical approaches to help understand the impacts of economic turbulence at the system and actor levels. The book provides a unique overview of the financial crisis and the important dimension of innovation dynamics for regional resilience. It also offers an engaging debate as to how regional resilience can be improved and explores the social aspects of vulnerability, resilience and innovation.

Leading researchers on economic resilience from economic geography, economic history and organizational studies discuss recent approaches to better understand the impact of structures, processes, agency, governance and multilevel settings on economic resilience.

The economic crisis of 2008-9 heralded the most severe economic downturn in the history of the European Union. Yet not all regions experienced economic decline and rates of recovery have varied greatly. This has raised new questions about what factors influence the economic resilience of regions. This book presents the results of an Applied Research Project conducted within the ESPON 2013 Programme and provides a detailed analysis of what made some European regions more resilient to the crisis than others.

Providing a coherent and clear narrative, Creating Resilient Economies offers a theoretical analysis of resilience and provides guidance to policymakers with regards to fostering more resilient economies and people. It adeptly illustrates how resilience thinking can offer the opportunity to re-frame economic development policy and practice and provides a clear evidence base of the cultural, economic, political and social conditions that shape the adaptability, flexibility and responsiveness to crises in their many forms.

The first fifteen years of the 21st century have thrown into sharp relief the challenges of growth, equity, stability, and sustainability facing the world economy. In addition, they have exposed the inadequacies of mainstream economics in providing answers to these challenges. This volume gathers over 50 leading scholars from around the world to offer a forward-looking perspective of economic geography to understanding the various building blocks, relationships, and trajectories in the world economy. The perspective is at the same time grounded in theory and in the experiences of particular places. Reviewing state-of-the-art of economic geography, setting agendas, and with illustrations and empirical evidence from all over the world, the book should be an essential reference for students, researchers, as well as strategists and policy makers. Building on the success of the first edition, this volume offers a radically revised, updated, and broader approach to economic geography. With the backdrop of the global financial crisis, finance is investigated in chapters on financial stability, financial innovation, global financial networks, the global map of savings and investments, and financialization. Environmental challenges are addressed in chapters on resource economies, vulnerability of regions to climate change, carbon markets, and energy transitions. Distribution and consumption feature alongside more established topics on the firm, innovation, and work. The handbook also captures the theoretical and conceptual innovations of the last fifteen years, including evolutionary economic geography and the global production networks approach. Addressing the dangers of inequality, instability, and environmental crisis head-on, the volume concludes with strategies for growth and new ways of envisioning the spatiality of economy for the future.