From Adversity to Advantage: A Systematic Literature Review on Regional Economic Resilience

Recent years have been exceptionally turbulent due to various crises such as COVID-19, wars, and natural disasters. We conduct a systematic literature review to address the current state of the regional economic resilience literature, a topic regaining significance amid recent global crises. Considering the findings, we not only conduct the most up-to-date analysis of resilience types but also innovate previous research by collecting and processing data on the spatial and income features of regions, providing statistics about shock coverage, and sharing insights into region types. Additionally, we supplement the systematic literature analysis methodology by experimenting with large language models and defining new search strategies. The results show that most of the literature covers European countries, while that covering all other countries is far behind. Empirical coverage comes from high- and upper-middle-income countries (~97% of research), highlighting the lack of analysis on lower-middle- and low-income countries. This brings into question the applicability of regional resilience policies worldwide. The latest papers still mainly analyze the Great Recession, the most covered shock in the regional economic resilience literature. Not all authors have turned their attention to more recent crises. Finally, we believe future research should focus more on compound resilience—how regional economies cope with cascading or simultaneous shocks.