Industrial relatedness and regional resilience in the European Union

The 2008 Great Recession prompted interest in the concept of regional resilience. This paper discusses and empirically investigates the relationship between industrial relatedness and economic resilience across European Union regions over the 2008–2012 crisis period. The analysis focuses on two types of industrial relatedness: technological and vertical (i.e., market-based). The empirical analysis is performed on a sample of 209 NUTS 2 regions in 16 countries. Our results highlight a positive effect of technological relatedness on the probability of resilience in the very short run (i.e., the 2008–2009 period), while the negative effect of vertical relatedness seems to persist for longer.