Spatial Connectivity and Regional Economic Resilience in Turbulent Times

The increasing number of economic shocks and disruptions and their highly heterogeneous territorial impacts reopened the debate on the ability of regions to withstand and recover from exogenous shocks. This paper focuses on the recessionary impact of the 2008 global financial economic crisis. It empirically explores the relationship between pre-crisis spatial connectivity and economic resilience across European Union (EU) regions over the 2008–2015 period. The empirical analysis is performed on a sample of 1312 NUTS-3 regions in 25 countries. Standard, spatial and multilevel hierarchical regression models are applied to investigate the effect of spatial connectivity and other pre-crisis determinants on regional economic resilience across three geographical scales: national, NUTS-2 regional and NUTS-3 regional. The results show that accessibility is an important factor for EU NUTS-3 regions to build resilience capabilities to exogenous shocks. Our findings demonstrate that higher accessibility is associated with greater regional economic resilience. The model results indicate a positive effect of migration and a negative effect of the ageing population on regional reaction to the crisis. Our analysis highlights the importance of country effects and spatial spillover effects on the ability of regions to shape resilience capabilities.