The economic resilience scorecard: regional policy responses for crises recovery

ABSTRACTWe assess the economic resilience of British subregions before, during and after the 2008 financial crisis. We apply our economic resilience scorecard to employment, output and productivity to assess the resilience dimensions of resistance, recovery and renewal. Our resulting scorecard ranks the South Eastern subregions and the Bristol/Bath region as having the highest economic resilience following the 2008 crisis, with Northumberland and Tyne and Wear, and East Yorkshire and Northern Lincolnshire having the lowest. Further policy measures are discussed to build regional resilience in recovery from multiple crisis.KEYWORDS: economic resiliencelevelling uplabour productivitybusiness cyclesJEL: C22E32 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSThe authors thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor, who helped us to develop the paper. An earlier version was published as a working paper (Sensier & Devine, Citation2020c).DISCLOSURE STATEMENTNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Notes1. A recent review of regional economic resilience has now set out a conceptual framework and concludes it is no longer a fuzzy concept (Sutton et al., Citation2023).2. The regional output series is from the ONS (Citation2019) release, which ends in 2018, and the ONS (Citation2020a) release for subregional productivity. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the subsequent release of 2019 data was delayed until May/July 2021, after the analysis and also published in the policy paper (Sensier & Devine, Citation2020b).3. We do not cover the reorientation dimension in this study as it would require us to monitor the subregional change in industrial patterns over time and is beyond the scope of this article.4. For an in-depth investigation into UK regional inequalities, see McCann (Citation2019).5. The UK government has set up a Levelling Up Advisory Council (https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/levelling-up-advisory-council). The policy has survived two changes of prime minister towards the end of 2022, but is now in a diminished form (Fransham et al., Citation2023).6. For the BBC story, see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-345093297. Previous examples include the Future Jobs Fund and the Young Person’s Guarantee announced in the April 2009 Budget by the Labour government and the Kickstart Scheme launched in September 2020 by the Conservative government in response to a significant forecast rise in youth unemployment as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.8. It is important to note that George Osborne, coalition government chancellor, had relied on the conclusions of Reinhart and Rogoff (Citation2010) that stated that government debt of over 90% of gross domestic product (GDP) had historically been associated with lower levels of growth. Errors were found in the spreadsheet calculation of this result and the direction of causality was not established. For a greater discussion of these points, see Davies (Citation2013).9. Gordon (Citation2016) states that elite consumption recovered quickly following the QE purchases and there was growth in property prices in London.10. The ONS reported that more deprived areas suffered higher death rates (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsinvolvingcovid19bylocalareasanddeprivation/deathsoccurringbetween1marchand17april).Additional informationFundingThe first author thank the Research Council of Norway for support during this work [grant https://regresir.vercel.app/].