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.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781315401867, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. This book brings together academics, members of European institutions, and regional and national level policymakers in order to assess the performance and direction of EU Cohesion policy against the background of the most significant reforms to the policy in a generation. Responding to past criticisms of the effectiveness of the policy, the policy changes introduced in 2013 have aligned European Structural and Investment Funds with the Europe 2020 strategy and introduced measures to improve strategic coherence, performance and integrated development. EU Cohesion Policy: Reassessing performance and direction argues that policy can only be successfully developed and implemented if there is input from both academics and practitioners. The chapters in the book address four important issues: the effectiveness and impact of Cohesion policy at European, national and regional levels; the contribution of Cohesion policy to the Europe 2020 strategy of smart, sustainable and inclusive growth; the importance of quality of government and administrative capacity for the effective management of the Funds; and the inter-relationships between institutions, territory and place-based policies. The volume will be an invaluable resource to students, academics and policymakers across economics, regional studies, European studies and international relations.

Regional policy is an essential in any government’s toolkit for promoting socioeconomic prosperity. It comes in many forms and can be used to target the development of weak and stronger regions. This textbook provides comprehensive and systematic coverage of regional policy, dealing with core theories and looking at contemporary challenges in practice, addressing regional policy across the world. Structured in four parts, the book opens with an exploration of regional policy’s characterisation, aims and rationale. The second part is devoted to issues of implementation and the instruments available to policymakers for intervention. The third part addresses regional policy evaluation, as well as statistics and modelling in policymaking. Finally, the book discusses how regional policy is applied in different contexts. Each chapter contains real-life examples of a regional policy topic in action and highlights supplementary topics for advanced readers. With its broad coverage of the subject, Regional Policy: Theory and Practice will prove a valuable resource for advanced students, researchers and practitioners in regional policy, regional economics, economic geography, planning and public policy.

The book first examines some radical new directions in Korea's regional policies instigated by the newly established permanent Presidential Commission of Regional Development. The existing nine provinces and seven 'Special Cities' (i.e. metropolitan areas), will yield considerable power and budget authority to seven new mega-regions. Many of the ideas behind the new policies (such as territorial cohesion, regional innovation and regional competitiveness) were inspired from abroad, especially Europe. There are also changes at the lower urban scale to modify Korea's traditional top-down strategies. Previous policies, named ?balanced national development', were targeted at undermining Seoul by redistributing activities, including government, to other parts of the country under the zero sum game assumption. The new policies aim to benefit both the Capital Region and other mega-regions under a ?win-win' assumption. The book evaluates these approaches. Original contributions from some of the field's foremost scholars - including Sang-Chuel Choe, Sir Peter Hall, Andreas Faludi, Michael Storper, Takashi Onishi, Maryann Feldman and Sam Ock Park - identify priorities for territorial integration, develop ideas for crossborder cooperation, discuss EU policy and policies for overall regional competitiveness, examine the construction of regional entrepreneurial advantage and consider fiscal policy and decision-making.

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.

Interdisciplinary in its approach, with expert contributors from diverse backgrounds, Resilience and Regional Development brings to light the significance of multiple dimensions of resilience and its implications for the economy.

Discussing the ongoing and future challenges of EU Cohesion Policy, this book critically addresses the economic, social and territorial challenges at the heart of the EU’s policy. It identifies the multifaceted and dynamic nature of the policy as well as the cohesions goal interlinkage with other policies and considers unresolved questions of strategic importance in territorial governance, urban and regional inequalities, and social aspects and wellbeing.