Measuring resilience to economic shocks: an application to Spain

In this paper, we evaluate Spanish regions’ resistance to the economic crisis under three main resilience notions: “adaptative,” “engineering” and “ecological.” “Adaptative” resilience is measured through a traditional shift-share approach applied to employment, whereas “engineering” and “ecological” resilience pay attention to growth path and total employment level, in the pre- and post-crisis period. The paper presents an application of the different notion of resilience to the case of Spanish provinces in the last years. We find that provinces with sectoral structure and location advantages, or those with locational advantages in the post-crisis period (according to the “adaptative” resilience measure), exhibit a significantly lower “drop” in growth (according to the “engineering” and “ecological” resilience measure). Furthermore, we conclude that the probability of presenting a better behavior (lower “drop” in growth than the average) increases for those regions specialized in the service sector before the crisis. As expected, the worse behavior has correspond to those regions specialized in the pre-crisis period in the construction sector.