The Spatial Patterns of Regional Employment in Europe as a Measure of Economic Resilience in Recession Periods

Abstract

Empirical literature in the field of regional resilience has most commonly concentrated on a unique economic shock. However, the existing studies have fallen short of comparing the resilience patterns across different crises. The purpose of this study is to investigate the geographical persistence of regional resilience across different recessionary shocks, namely: 1) the 2008–2010 Global Financial Crisis; 2) the 2011–2013 Sovereign Debt Crisis; 3) the 2019–2020 COVID-19 pandemic. The study covers 202 European Nuts II regions. It applied a range of empirical tools such as Markovian Transition Probability Matrices, Global Moran’s and Local Moran’s, Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests, Kendal’s tau, and Spearman’s correlation coefficient, as well as illustrative maps. As an outcome, several important conclusions are reached. First, the spatial pattern of resilience is not stable/persistent over time, as the three recessions tend to hit different places at different crisis times. Second, in general, Southern European regions are the most consistently fragile/vulnerable regions. Third, spatial patterns of resilience are weakly correlated across the different recessions. From the policy standpoint, it is understood that dealing with employment resilience is more difficult than previously thought by the policymakers. Since the resilience pattern is not stable spatially, each crisis should be evaluated separately and no generic policy rules can be formulated to foster the resilience. Thus, one can understand that although the sources of the crises are different, there may be some geographies that are structurally suffering the recessions which necessitate a consideration of the reasons and the formulation of the related policies. © Authors 2025.