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Spatial Economic Resilience: Overview and Perspectives

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Abstract

The concept of resilience has been receiving both theoretical and empirical attention in recent years, from different disciplinary fields, including spatial economics where resilience is becoming a ‘popular’ term. In particular, the concept of spatial economic resilience seems to assume slightly different interpretations. Starting from the basic definitions of resilience, which stem from ecology, this paper aims to highlight the similarities and the differences in the various analyses of resilience, in order to offer some insights into its use in the spatial economics literature.

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Notes

  1. For instance, the Project for Economic Resilience, Investment and Social Assistance in Indonesia (PERISAI) of the World Bank and the USAID programme, Resilience and Economic Growth in the Arid Lands-Accelerated Growth deal with economic resilience from slightly different perspectives, albeit they share the same main final goal, which is to improve economic resilience. The World Bank programme aims at a static version of resilience: namely, it is designed to strengthen the capacity of the Indonesian government to deal with the potential adverse impacts of international financial market volatility. The USAID program, instead, aims at an adaptive version of resilience since the goal of the project is to accelerate growth and move towards an improved market system

  2. Merriam-Webster Dictionary and McDargh (2013) http://www.eileenmcdargh.com/blog/2013/11/tough-times-demand/

  3. For a review of spatial science see also Ducruet and Beauguitte (2013).

  4. This selection of papers and working papers was obtained using the Google Scholar search engine and the Scopus database. Duplications or cross citations of the definitions are not considered.

  5. We did not consider single authored books, edited volumes, or Special Issues on resilience.

  6. Concerning the role of the spatial interaction in social networks see, among others Illenberger et al. (2013).

  7. Note that vulnerability and resilience play key roles in the sensitivity of a system to natural disasters, and in development studies.

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Acknowledgments

The authors want to thank two referees for constructive comments. The first author acknowledges the Project ‘The Economic Evaluation of Natural Disaster in Italy’ (sponsored by Fondazioni Generali), as well as the joint Project INTEGRATE (‘Technological Innovation for a Rational Management of Urban Constructions’) between National Research Council (CNR, Italy) and Regione Lombardia (Italy). The second author gratefully acknowledges partial financial support from FARB project no. FFBO127034 (University of Bologna, Italy) and FIRB 2012 project no. RBFR1269HZ_003 (Ministry of Education, University and Research, Italy).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CNR—CERIS Institute for Economic Research on Firms and Growth, Via Bassini 15, 20133, Milan, Italy

    Marco Modica

  2. Department of Economics, University of Bologna, Piazza Scaravilli 2, 40126, Bologna, Italy

    Aura Reggiani

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  1. Marco Modica
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Correspondence to Marco Modica.

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Modica, M., Reggiani, A. Spatial Economic Resilience: Overview and Perspectives. Netw Spat Econ 15, 211–233 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11067-014-9261-7

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