9 Apr 2019

"Regional Resilience: Towards an Evolutionary Approach" with Ron Boschma

While the concept of regional economic resilience is gaining popularity among academics and policy makers, there is no universally accepted definition of resilience. Boschma, as one of the founding scholars of Evolutionary Economic Geography, proposes an evolutionary perspective on regional resilience. He conceptualizes resilience not just as the ability of a region to accommodate shocks, but extends it to the long-term ability of regions to develop new growth paths. Resilience is a highly path-dependent process, thus to understand how regions adapt and develop new growth paths after crises or decline, history is key. Boschma argues, that regional resilience is shaped by related and unrelated variety, knowledge networks and institutional structures. Ron Boschma is Full Professor in Regional Economics at the Department of Economic Geography at the Faculty of Geosciences, University of Utrecht (Netherlands). He received a PhD degree in Economics at the Tinbergen Institute, Faculty of Economics and Econometrics, Erasmus University Rotterdam in 1994 and a Master Degree in Social Geography at the Faculty of Economics, University of Amsterdam, 1988. His scientific work concentrates on working out conceptually and empirically Evolutionary Economic Geography. Boschma has published in international journals on the spatial evolution of industries, the geography of innovation, proximity and innovation, the structure and evolution of spatial networks, regional diversification, and agglomeration externalities and regional growth.Boschma is Associate Editor of Regional Studies since 2013, and a member of the Editorial Boards of Economic Geography and Review of Regional Research (Jahrbuch für Regionalwissenschaft). He is also Editor of the working paper series Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography.

7 May 2019

"A Scenario Approach to Crisis and Recovery" with Roberta Capello

Profound economic crisis can severely impact local economies’ growth paths, causing not only short-term recessions but also significant long-term costs. In order to study long-term regional development after an economic shock, Prof. Capello will introduce a scenario building methodology, based on the Macroeconometric Regional Growth Forecasting Model (MASST). The model recently has been updated to take account of the crisis and is able to show the main trends and relative behavioural paths that will be at work under specific assumptions on how the main driving forces of change will evolve. Roberta Capello is full professor of Regional Economics at Politecnico of Milan, Faculty of Architecture and Building Engineering. She received her Ph.D. in Economic from the Free University of Amsterdam and her first degree from Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, Milan. Her scientific work concentrates on regional growth, knowledge and local innovation, agglomeration economies and regional growth forecasting models. Capello has published extensively in international journals such as "Regional Studies", "European Planning Studies" and the "Journal of Economic Geography". She is also chief editor of the journals "Papers in Regional Science" and the “Italian Regional Science Journal” as well as a member of the Editorial Board of the journal “Growth and Change”.

26 Jun 2019

"How Regions Can Re-invent Themselves " with Pierre-Alexandre Balland

No region can rely on past successes, rather constant transformation and re-invention is necessary for a region to keep developing. Many regional policies, such as smart specialization, aim to support regions in this process of re-invention. Yet, the operationalization of regional development policies has been rather limited because a coherent set of analytical tools to guide the policy directives remains elusive. In this webinar Pierre-Alexandre Balland proposes a policy framework around the concepts of relatedness and knowledge complexity. Based on a recent study, he shows that diversifying into more complex technologies is attractive but difficult for European Union regions to accomplish. Regions can overcome this diversification dilemma by developing new complex technologies that build on local related capabilities. These findings are then used to construct a policy framework for smart specialization that highlights the potential risks and rewards for regions of adopting competing diversification strategies. Pierre-Alexandre Balland is Assistant Professor of Economic Geography and Network Science at Utrecht University, Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Media Lab), and Fellow at the Center for Complex Systems Studies. He received his Master and PhD degree in Economics from the University of Toulouse in France. His interests and scientific work concentrates on Economic Geography, Economics of Innovation, the evolution of knowledge and network science. Balland has published his research in international journals such as "Regional Studies", "Journal of Economic Geography", "Research Policy" and "Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society".

2 Jul 2019

"Propagation of Economic Shocks in Input-Output Networks" with M. Contreras

The recent economic crisis propagated quickly through various channels around the world. In this webinar Prof. Martha G. Alatriste Contreras presents her work on shock propagation through the input- output network which connect industrial sectors in developed economies. She presents alternative models of diffusion on networks and calibrate them using input-output data on real-world inter-sectoral dependencies for several European countries before the Great Depression. The results are intriguing: the impact of economic shocks strongly depends on the nature of the shock and country size. In particular, shocks that impact on final demand without changing production and the technological relationships between sectors have on average a large but very homogeneous impact on the economy. Conversely, when shocks change also the magnitudes of input-output across-sector interdependencies (and possibly sector production), the economy is subject to predominantly large but more heterogeneous avalanche sizes. Moreover, the centrality of an industry in the country network and the size of the country matters for shock propagation. Martha G. Alatriste Contreras is Associate Professor in Economics at the Faculty of Economics, National Autonomous University of Mexico. She received her PhD. from GREQAM- Aix-Marseille University (Aix-Marseille School of Economics), CNRS , EHESS (France) in 2014 and an MA degree from the Paris School of Economics. Her research interests and scientific work focuses on complexity economics, computational economics, networks, industrial structure and structural change as well as input-output analysis, industrial policy, diffusion of shocks and quantitative methods in general. Alatriste Contreras published her work in several international journals such as "Physical Review E" and the "Journal of Economic Structures". Moreover, she is referee for journals including "Journal of Economic Interaction" and "Coordination, Economic Systems Research".

5 Dec 2019

Regional economic resilience: which local factors matter? with Tasos Kitsos

Anastasios (Tasos) Kitsos is a research fellow at City-REDI (University of Birmingham) where he currently holds an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship.Tasos’ research interests cover a wide spectrum of regional inequalities in economic resilience, productivity and growth, the presence and impact of digital and creative economies, the electoral considerations in the distribution of public resources and the capacity of local industrial structures to benefit from spending in their area. In this webinar, Tasos will be presenting his work on regional economic resilience.The 2008 crisis has had profound impacts on economies around the World. These impacts have been significantly heterogeneous as to their spatial footprint within countries. This has given rise into research on the measurement and factors of local economic resilience. Tasos will be discussing his quantitative work and latest developments in measuring the differential resilience performance of local economies as well as his work on resilience determinants. The latter will span individual characteristics such as skills and demographics to regional contextual factors such as entrepreneurial dynamism and the embeddedness of local industrial structures. Beyond presenting current work, the aim of the session is to discuss future avenues in resilience research and policymaking with scholars from different countries. We will also use this webinar, being the last in this series, to recap previous webinars on regional economic resilience and aim for a fruitful discussion with our speaker Tasos and all webinar participants!