Effects of Smart Specialisation on Regional Labour Resilience

Abstract

The global economy has experienced great volatility and uncertainty during the last decades. Economic effects of global recession in the period 2008-2009 showed to be diverse in terms of territorial impacts. This has raised interest in the empirical investigation of the causes of such territorial differences and supported the increase in literature dealing with the resilience concept and determinants of regional economic resilience. This research addresses literature gaps in understanding the role of smart specialisation process in regional labour resilience, as it is one of the cornerstones of the new place-based regional development policy approach in the European Union (EU). To this end, we have developed a new proxy for smart specialisation and employed the data for EU regional labour resilience for two different periods, recession (2007-2009) and recovery (2009-2014), which is determined based on regional economic performance data. Then, the EU regions were grouped in four categories considering resistance and recovery dimension of the resilience concept. We provide the extension of the existing literature by separately analysing the recovery dimension of the resilience concept in the short and long run. The multinomial logistic model enabled us to examine in detail the differential effects of all relevant resilience determinants. Research results indicate significant and positive effects of smart specialisation on regional labour resilience, especially for regions of the most resilient group. Furthermore, our study confirmed the significance of other determinants for regional labour resilience, such as stage of regional development, regional economic structure, population and education. The findings could be used for establishing the theoretical background for important socio-economic channels through which smart specialisation affects regional labour resilience and creating effective regional development policy measures.