Region’s Adaptability to Shocks: Theoretical Aspects

The subject of the work is approaches to assessing shock impacts on regional economic dynamics during crises. The multidirectional impact of external shocks is considered, causing negative consequences for economic development in some constituent entities of the Russian Federation, in others exerting a subtle impact or even leading to economic growth in the future, based on structural changes. The purpose of the work is to develop approaches to assessing the adaptability of Russian regions to the crisis. The objective is to provide a theoretical review of the concept of «economic resilience», understood as the ability of a region to adapt to external shocks, and the concepts of «resilience» and «sustainability» of regional systems that form it. The empirical task is related to the substantiation of approaches to the quantitative assessment of the level of adaptability in terms of sustainability and recovery of regional development rates after shock impacts. The methodology for assessing regional adaptability is based on the identification of two factors: the factor of sustainability (resilience), which implies the ability of the region’s economic system to maintain its own size and structure after a deforming impact, and the recovery factor (elasticity), which takes into account the ability of the regional system to restore the economic system in the process of a transformational decline as a result of a shock impact. It is shown that sustainability is formed by the retrospective state of the regional economic system, and the rate of recovery of the regional system from the shock depends on the state of the regional system itself and the nature of the crisis that caused the shock impact