Regional resilience and anti-fragility in the EU
Regional resilience and anti-fragility in the EU

Summary/Abstract: Supply and demand shocks through the COVID‑19 pandemic and the Russia ‑Ukraine war have underscored the critical importance of the ability of regional economies to adjust to external shocks. The need to increase regional resilience and mitigate their adverse effects has become a subject of discussion among researchers and policymakers. More recently, another concept related to resilience, namely anti ‑fragility, has entered the debate. The purpose of the article is to discuss the concepts of regional resilience and anti ‑fragility from a theoretical perspective, as well as to present the results of an empirical analysis which explores regional economic resilience and anti‑ fragility (measured at the same scale) of EU NUTS‑2 regions while including a structural analysis of contributing factors. NUTS‑2 GVA data for 225 regions from 19 EU member states were used; the time series ranged from 2013 to 2023. The GVA growth rate for 2013-2019 served as the background period, and the data for 2010-2023 as the crisis period to compute each region's resilience score. In the second part of the empirical analysis, a hierarchical regression model was employed to investigate whether structural factors influence the resilience scores of the regions. The picture of regional resilience in the EU is complex, with several key findings. First, a great many of the vulnerable regions were located in Central Europe, moreover, a significant number of geographically peripheral regions proved to be anti ‑fragile. While strong manufacturing sectors are often associated with more resilient economies, our findings revealed a surprising result: a higher share of manufacturing in gross value added has a negative impact on resilience. This may be explained by the nature of recent shocks, the interconnections of European industry within global value chains, and energy price volatility. The findings may contribute to the contemporary debate on economic resilience and, given that they were obtained at the regional (sub‑ national) level, allow for a focus on structural factors rather than the key policy issues that were decisive at the national level.

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