Timothy Slaper (p)

Daniela-Liminita Constantin

Using the experience of some 3100 U.S. counties as a practical guidepost, this paper slightly recasts salient concepts and measures of economic resilience. The paper proposes what to measure and how to measure the phases of resilience given the experience of the Great Recession and the recovery across U.S. regions do not lend themselves to a standard template of shock, drop and recovery-to-trend employment growth.

Using several unique experiences of selected counties, we make the case for greater flexibility in conceptualizing and measuring the phases of economic shocks and the following recovery or, often, a mal-adaptive hysteresis condition.

We configure the concept and measurement of recovery – trough to expected trend – into 2 parts for both conceptual and measurement relevance. A strong motivation for which is, as of 2016, a vast majority of U.S. regions had not recover to the expected trend. We apply and calculate these measures for all U.S. counties using BLS data from 2002 through 2016.

We statistically assess the relationships of these measures with respect to other measures of economic performance, industry structure and other regional characteristics. We find that the statistical associations do vary depending on the regions’ scale and rurality. We find that the presence and growth of industry clusters is positively associated with resilience, both drop and return-to-peak. The proportion income from transfer payments – social security and disability – has a negative relationship with both drop and return to the pre-recession peak. The proportion of shock prone industries has a negative relationship with the return-to-peak, no doubt because those industries are subject to price and volume shocks outside the region and nation. Surprisingly, the Shannon diversity variable, typically having a negative and significant relationship with employment growth was not statistically significant for drop or return-to-peak.

Alexandru Bănică (p), Gabriela-Carmen Pascariu, Bogdan Ibănescu, Mihail Eva

Daniela-Liminita Constantin

Smart specialization aims to ensure the implementation of a certain development path based on a limited number of domains in which there is a high potential of capitalizing exceptional features and assets of a region which might reinforce economic growth and build its competitive position on the global market. Several connections between smart specialization and regional resilience have been identified in the literature, such as the capacity to learn from past events and crisis and to innovate. The present study falls within the wider context of assessing the impact that current strategies can have on building regional resilience. Thus, the paper explores the role of the Smart Specialisation strategies, in the context of the new European Union cohesion policy, in inducing or opposing to economic resilience of the lagging EU’s regions, considering the institutional determinants. The aim of the research is to evaluate whether the domains chosen for smart specialization of peripheral regions have also the potential to increase regional resilience and to enhance competitiveness, while reducing the gap to the more developed regions. First, the current approach makes a general assessment of peripheral regions in European Union by taking into account the resilience performance of these regions when confronting the economic crisis. Meanwhile, their proposals of vertical priorities of smart specialization were analysed. Second, the analysis was deepened in the case of the North East Region in Romania by using the time series analysis in order to discover how resilient were the four domains (agro-food, textiles and clothes, IT&C, and biotechnologies), identified as key sectors in the Regional Smart Specialization Strategy during the economic crisis (2008-2011) and how they bounced back after this perturbation. The results show that there is an obvious difference between the contribution of the four analysed domains to competitiveness at national and European level, but also a difference in their resilience inducing potential. Finally, the perception of different stakeholders (mainly those included in Smart Specialization Regional Consortium) was assessed by applying semi-structured interviews that aimed at highlighting the contribution of the four domains in enhancing and transforming regional economy. The present study tried and, to a certain extent, succeeded in exploring the resilience performance of vertical priorities of North East Region, during and after the recent economic crisis, in order to contribute to an assessment of their potential in overcoming shocks and sustaining long-term development.

Raluca Ignat (p)

Daniela-Liminita Constantin

Purpose: The main purpose of this paper is to emphasize the correlation between some quality of life indicators and Romanian entrepreneurial manifestation, especially for the younger in the most vulnerable age period, 15-30 years. Based on the correlation, proposals for policy makers and public programmers are discussed and opportunities for future research are outlined.
Methodology: The research question of the paper is how much does influence the quality of life in Romania the entrepreneurial resilience? In order to reach the answer, a statistic analysis of secondary data from the National Trade Register Office in Romania regarding the number of the incorporation of private limited companies for debutantes and such others is being run together with some national indicators from the quality of life perspectives, such income level and unemployment rate, number of fiscal taxes. Than an analysis on the correlation between few quality of life indicators and number of new created/registered companies in Romania is run.
Findings: The paper identifies the conceptual junction between entrepreneurship and resilience, and the connectivity of these two concepts and quality of life. Resilience is a modern concept, although it was first used in engineering in the middle of the last century. The evolution of the concept is interesting, because this concept has gone through an obvious and notable multi-discipline.
In the last three decades, Romania was the scene of important social, political and economic exchanges, more likely shocks. In the same time, young citizens resilience was tested by unexpected and major shocks, such as revolution, changes of the economic framework, transition from centralized economy to market economy, impact of IT on the main Romanian industries and their real reorganization, the continuous urban-rural development gap, the brain-drain and labor migration towards more develop countries, the impact of the structural, European and national funds. Yet, Romania succeed in show resilient companies and, resilient entrepreneurs. What are the causes of all these and which will be the most important ingredient for their success represent important questions for economic and business resilience in general, and for Romanians especially.
Paper type: literature review, statistical analysis, comparative analysis

Gabriela Carmen Pascariu (p), Bogdan Ibanescu

Daniela-Liminita Constantin

Tourism activities are seen as an engine for sustainable economic growth and an instrument for regional convergence, contributing to the catching up of less developed countries and regions. Its performance as convergence producer is highly related to the tourism multiplier effect and the ability of tourism activities to integrate other economic activities. Additionally, due to its dynamism and strong connections with related economic branches, tourism is also considered a resilience provider. However, its influence on both regional convergence and regional resilience is currently understudied, as traditional approaches to the study of tourism impact are focused rather on economic growth generated by tourism activities. This article focuses on identifying the impact of tourism on regional convergence and regional resilience in European Union. We used stepwise regression to evaluate the influence of tourism on both convergence and resilience capacity. The preliminary results of the study showed that the development of tourism in the Union had a strong potential to contribute to the reduction of intra-EU regional inequalities. Furthermore, in particular cases, tourism activities manage to generate higher resilience capacity for destinations. These findings could potentially have important implications for policy making in European Union. The indication is that our preliminary results seem to be supporting the principle of integrating tourism into growth, resilience, and convergence-oriented policies. These results can be used by policy makers to develop targeted interventions aimed at enhancing the multiplier capacity in peripheral and lagging regions in order to reduce regional disparities and increase tourism competitiveness throughout the European Union.