Jaewon Shin (p), Yeong Kim , lihuiyuan Lee

South Korea has been aggressively exploring “Businesses to Create a Good Environment to Live in” by the central government and has seen some improvements and recoveries in local communities. However, it is evident that businesses to recover local communities have also been supported by local governments and not only from the central government. Recently, a growing interest in local communities by citizens has expanded areas with independently operated community activities. These activities have spread wide enough that local governments have started to offer support systems and a council for stakeholders to discuss different matters for the promotion and recovery of communities. As such, local communities are becoming an important aspect of regional policies and it is likely that the citizens’ requests for improved communities will increase. As such this current research on recovering local communities has focused on smaller, rural cities (which have been showing slower growth compared to metropolitan cities), in particular Jinju-Si, in order to identify and deduce the influencing factors in community recovery. In terms of research methods, Focus Group Interviews (FGI) have been operated amongst 50 citizens to determine the independent variables, and a survey form was developed based on the independent variables; 213 citizens were surveyed for the research. Based on the survey results, the Cronbach’s α (reliability analysis) and correlation analysis were used to confirm that the variables were accurate. In addition, multiple regression model was used to deduce the important elements of recovering communities. Overall, it is believed that the elements deduced from this current research do not only apply to Jinji-Si, but also other smaller, rural cities that need local community recovery.

Marco Modica (p), Giovanni Marin, Susanna Paleari, Roberto Zoboli

The paper provides a comprehensive assessment of hazard, vulnerability, resilience and exposure related to natural disasters for the population of Italian municipalities. We employ state-of-the-art methods to build indicators of the various components of risk assessment and devote a particular attention to the consideration of various different aspects of the economic exposure of municipalities.
The combination of these four dimensions is particularly useful to identify hot spot areas that are characterized by high hazard, exposure and vulnerability and by low resilience. A tool like the one proposed in our paper that helps policy makers to identify priority areas of intervention is likely to be very valuable in presence of tight public budgets in order to take effective choices about mitigation and prevention strategies.

John Östh (p), Aura Reggiani , Peter Nijkamp

Shocks to a regional economy may be more or less cyclical, severe and subject to a number of factors of which some may have global reach and effect, whilst others may be national or just regional. Immediate effects to economic shocks often include layoffs, souring unemployment figures and socioeconomic inequality, but in the long run population loss through outmigration are inevitable.
Regional ability to cope with the effects of the shock is usually referred to as regional economic resilience and is measured as a single or composite parameter index. Most of the traditionally used indexes measure resilience on just a regional level, disregarding factors in neighbouring regions and thereby also the effects of commuting and migration. By integrating accessibility in a composite measure of resilience to ensure that also neighbouring factors are accounted for, and by taking the size of labour demand in neighbouring regions into account, a new measure of regional economic resilience is developed that not only correlates better with regions’ ability to retain population, but also is relatively simple to compute.
Results from our study in Sweden indicate that by integrating spatial interaction into models of regional economic resilience improves correlation with regions’ abilities to retain population or even grow through inmigration.

Hans Westlund (p), Lucia Naldi , Johan P Larsson

The transformation from the manufacturing economy to a knowledge economy, in combination with globalization, has meant changed relationships between metropolitan regions and regions consisting of small and medium sized towns (SMSTs). SMSTs that not have been integrated in expanding metropolitan regions have in many cases faced severe challenges of industrial decline and depopulation.
Based on the concept of policy entrepreneurship, we performed a survey to the municipal directors in Sweden and followed up this with interviews in twenty municipalities. This paper explores the policy entrepreneurship for strengthening and renewing local business life and improving the own administration in Swedish SMSTs. It analyzes economic, geographic and demographic factors that determine these activities and it examines possible differences between the policy entrepreneurship of SMSTs and municipalities in metropolitan regions.