Teemu Makkonen

While there are established methods for measuring regional economic resilience, a universally accepted approach for operationalizing accurate multivariate resilience applicable at the local level over several crises remains elusive. This study examines the impacts of the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Ukraine conflict on Finnish municipalities by analyzing local-scale resilience using monthly indicators. Whereas most resilience studies rely on annual data at broader regional levels (NUTS) potentially overlooking critical local developments, this study employs municipal (LAU-2) monthly data to capture short-term dynamics in unemployment, net migration, and job vacancies through the construction of a Local Resilience Index (LRI). The results show substantial variation in resilience across crises, geography, and municipal types, with increasing polarization and spatial clustering during more recent crises. Regression analyses indicate that resilience is a context-dependent and dynamic phenomenon, shaped by crisis-specific factors such as housing structure, education, entrepreneurship, and labour market conditions. Notably, only one consistent factor, stronger labour market structures, was associated with resilience across all crises. Findings highlight the complex nature of local resilience and underscore the limitations of one-size-fits-all strategies. They point to the need for place-based, longitudinal, and mixed-method approaches to better understand resilience at the local level.

Using a novel dataset, we examine whether state jobs have centralised away from rural municipalities to larger cities in Finland, and how this process has affected regional disparities. Additionally, we test whether the centralisation of state jobs reflects state withdrawal or an adaptation to population decline. Our methodological approach combines descriptive statistics with Granger causality tests. The findings reveal that the distribution of state jobs has become increasingly uneven as they are centralising in the largest cities. The increasing spatial inequality in the job distribution is significantly more pronounced in the state sector than in the municipal and private sectors. Furthermore, changes in state employment rarely reflect an adaptation to population decline. Rather, state withdrawal more likely exacerbates than alleviates distress in certain (particularly rural) municipalities. These findings highlight the importance of state employment for rural development.

The importance of the third sector has been recognized by academia and policymakers. However, little is known about the geography of third sector associations. This issue is of central importance as the third sector is increasingly expected to play a role in solving local societal challenges. Here, the geography of the third sector is investigated at the municipal level in Finland using quantitative data and statistical analyses. The results show that socio-economically less advantageous and rural regions host the most third sector associations per capita. This creates a conundrum. On the one hand, there are abundant numbers of third sector associations in rural regions that could step in to address local societal challenges. On the other hand, rural regions are among the most poorly locally resourced, casting doubt on the future of their operations.

Since a few years, the international economic system has been experiencing the risk of growing fragmentation and uncertainty. However, research on Regional Innovation Systems (RIS) has yet to comprehensively engage with this phenomenon, despite its (spatial) significance. The paper contributes to addressing this gap, in particular by exploring the potential implications for RIS arising from the decline, disruption or reconfiguration of international knowledge flows associated with economic de‐globalisation. The study seeks to define a theoretical approach grounded in economic geography to assess this trend. It applies such perspective to three types of RIS (metropolitan, old industrial and peripheral) across five analytical dimensions that capture the structural and relational factors shaping RIS exposure and resilience to de‐globalisation. The discussion highlights that, in the face of knowledge and technological disruptions or shifts arising from international instability, metropolitan RIS may leverage their diversified knowledge bases, dense institutional frameworks and strong global connectivity to successfully reconfigure external linkages; old industrial RIS may follow mixed trajectories, with the risk of deepening economic and policy lock‐ins; while peripheral RIS, due to their reliance on external knowledge sources and limited endogenous innovation capacity, emerge as the most vulnerable.