Andrew Crawley

The term resilience has begun to proliferate in regional economic literature over the last decade as more and more authors have sought to connect the term to economic shocks. Resilience as a concept is not new, particularly for ecology and engineering, but its use in regional economic analysis is more recent. Many authors have sought to define and measure the resilience of regions to exogenous shocks, utilizing multifaceted interdisciplinary approaches. This paper uses a bibliometric approach to conduct an in-depth critical review of both the definitions and metrics associated with regional resilience. We found 98 unique studies that were reviewed to collate and analyze methods and indicators used to measure regional economic resilience. Our analysis identified 202 unique metrics (e.g., educational attainment) associated with regional economic resilience that can be aggregated into 15 overarching themes (e.g., demographics), and represented in 3 distinct clusters (e.g., community development).

This paper examines the use of location quotients, a measure of regional business activity relative to the national benchmark, as an indicator of sectoral agglomeration in small cities and towns, and as a measure of industry specialization that might impact the number of new business startups in these places. Using establishment-level data on businesses located in Maine, our findings suggest that the addition of one "hypothetical" establishment in very small towns leads to a dramatic change in the magnitude of the region-industry location quotient. At population sizes of about 4,100 or more people, however, location quotients are reasonably stable. Regression results from an analysis of the relationship between new business activity and regional industry specialization show that the effect of location quotients on business startups switches from "inelastic" to "elastic" at a population size cutoff of about 2,600 residents. Overall, our findings suggest that researchers and practitioners should exercise caution when using location quotients to study small regions.

Smart Specialisation (S3) has been the driving force behind the European Union's regional innovation strategy for the last seven years. However, criticism has been levelled at the policy as lacking an evidence base. This paper tackles this gap in the literature by providing an empirical assessment of a strategy remarkably similar to S3: the Maine Economic Improvement Fund (MEIF). The paper finds that the MEIF has succeeded in increasing employment, but is less successful in increasing productivity. Given the similarity between the MEIF and S3, the paper provides important lessons for European practitioners and policy-makers implementing the strategy.

The US has witnessed an unprecedented period of employment expansion following the 2008/09 recession. This article uses a Beveridge curve approach to estimate US labour matching efficiency over the course of the last decade. It then analyses the effect of increasing employment on this efficiency. The results show that employment and labour market efficiency are co-integrated and as employment rises the efficiency of the matching process decreases.

Over the last decade the UK has seen greater fiscal devolution with both Wales and Scotland gaining additional powers. However, to date, such devolution has not been sufficiently accompanied by an increase in the production of more local economic data to assist policymaking choices. The paper considers this issue by first exploring, in general, the availability of local economic data with a focus on Input–Output tables and trade statistics. The case of Wales is then used to explore the problems associated with the lack of local economic data. The paper suggests that not providing the means to assess how fiscal policy might impact economic performance could present a particularly serious challenge for devolved governments. The conclusions discuss how a devolved data deficit might be overcome in a cost-effective manner.

The City Region is becoming the spatial focus for economic development policy across many parts of the European continent. But these functional regions have taken on a new impetus in the UK with the introduction of ‘city deals’ aimed at improving network and coordination of actors in local authorities. One of the goals of city regions is to improve industrial policy particularly lacking since the abolition of many of the Regional Development Agencies across the UK. However, city regions in developing policy appear to be following in an unquestioning manner the industrial priorities of earlier institutions, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of the identification of priority industry development sectors. Too often the selection of industries and clusters for special support has been undertaken in an unquestioning manner. In this paper we focus on the case of the Cardiff Capital Region. We review approaches to identify priority sectors in this case and the problems associated with this policy approach.