Regional economic resilience, hysteresis and recessionary shocks

The notion of ‘resilience’ has recently risen to prominence in several disciplines, and has also entered policy discourse. Yet, the meaning and relevance of the concept are far from settled matters. This article develops the idea of resilience and examines its usefulness as an aid to understanding the reaction of regional economies to major recessionary shocks. But in so doing, it is also argued that the notion of resilience can usefully be combined with that of hysteresis in order to more fully capture the possible reactions of regional economies to major recessions. These ideas are then used as the basis for a preliminary empirical analysis of the UK regions.