Economic resilience in Central and Eastern European countries

Interest in economic resilience has been rising particularly in the aftermath of the GFC. Since then, the experience has highlighted how a lack of resilience can have noteworthy and persistent harmful effects not only on the countries distressed, but also spill-overs on other countries. This topic is particularly relevant nowadays since the current health crisis came with rising vulnerabilities and increasing imbalances. The aim of this paper is threefold: (i) to distil features of economic resilience underlined in previous works and carefully select those most relevant for the CEE member states, (ii) to gauge the degree of resilience of individual CEE country through a composite index, and (iii) to highlight the temporal dimension of economic resilience. This article underlines notable differences in the resilience of CEE countries, heterogeneity caused by a combination of economic, social and institutional factors. To quickly visualize the degree of economic resilience across CEE countries, we constructed a heatmap illustrating the strengths and weaknesses of each individual economy, reflecting differences across economies in the depth of the crisis, but also in their ability to recover.