Breaking the Black-Box of Regional Resilience: A Taxonomy Using a Dynamic Cumulative Shift-Share Occupational Approach

In the European literature on the regional and local development, the concept of resilience has progressively gained momentum, eventually overwhelming that of competitiveness and posing a critical challenge for the future of territorial studies and the territorialisation of the policy discourse. In the current economic turmoil, the success of an urban and regional economy relies more and more on its capacity to react to sudden shocks in a positive and evolutionary perspective, i.e., in its resilience. Nevertheless, as a recent analysis of the employment dynamics of Italian metro-regions in the period before and after 2008 has demonstrated that the existing taxonomies may be distant from reality and hardly communicable. The paper proposes a taxonomy of regional resilience based on the consideration of the region’s capacity of both improving its employment rate during the pre-crisis period and overcoming the concurrent performance of the nation. Via a shift-share analysis of the employment in Italian metro-regions, the paper investigates the contribution of the sectoral structure of the local labour market in terms of economic resilience. The result is twofold: a geography of the dynamism of the territorial systems in Italy that diverges from some “classic” interpretative frameworks; a novel taxonomic approach to regional resilience.