Tingting Liu (p), Carolina Castaldi, Deyu Li

Arnault Morisson

Regional resilience has gained increasing attention since the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we discuss the role of digital innovation in responding to the physical restrictions imposed by the pandemic and supporting sustained transformations. We conceptualize digital innovation as consisting of new technologies and applications. Empirically, we measure them with digital patents and digital business at the prefectural-level in China. Regional digital innovation was negatively associated with resistance to COVID-19 but positively associated with recovery. Importantly, this positive relationship mostly concerned the ability of regions to develop digital applications, rather than digital technologies alone.

Susana Franco (p), Asier Murciego, James R. Wilson

Tingting Liu

Following recent literature that has measured economic complexity on the basis of the diversity of activities present in territories (i.e. the amount of activities in which a territory specialises) and the ubiquity of such activities (i.e. how widespread activities are across territories) (Fritz and Manduca, 2021; Hidalgo, 2021; Wohl, 2020), this paper explores the relationship between economic complexity and resilience. It draws on a dataset that has estimated employment disaggregated at 4-digit NACE level for 201 European regions, and constructs an index of complexity in three discrete years: 2008, at the beginning of the effects of the Great Recession on employment; 2013, when most regions had begun recovery and employment had started to grow again; and 2018, when employment growth had been sustained for several years, leading to changes in employment specialisation patterns as recovery differed across sectors and regions. Comparing levels and changes in the complexity index in these periods with changes in total employment and GDP per capita, we question whether economic complexity can contribute to the resilience of regions and whether that resilience depends on the type of complexity (all sectors vs manufacturing).

Arnault Morisson (p)

Susana Franco

Switzerland emerged as a global leader in the development of blockchain technologies and crypto assets. Blockchain, the technology behind cryptocurrencies that emerged with the creation of Bitcoin in 2008, can integrate into multiple applications in a decentralised manner. One example is decentralized finance or DeFi, which offers a new decentralised financial infrastructure. In this paper we explain the emergence of the Blockchain industry in Switzerland thanks to the Swiss institutional alignment (for instance, decentralisation, neutrality, secrecy) and institutional relatedness (Swiss financial sector) with the technology needs. We then explore the regional divergence between two Swiss first-mover towns--Zug and Chiasso--that promoted the crypto industry early on. Branded as Crypto Valley, Zug is a medium-sized town that is home to more than half of all blockchain and crypto companies in Switzerland. We demonstrate that a greater institutional alignment and a more intensive institutional work were decisive in the development of Blockchain sector in Zug.