Spatial economic resilience and accessibility: A joint perspective

In most studies of economic resilience, much effort is attributed to the development of factors and measures representing economic and related resilience. In this context, a great deal of attention is devoted to the role of regions and to their abilities to withstand an economic shock. Usually, however, less attention is given to the size, distribution and interaction of the regions containing the underlying statistics used in the calculation of resilience factors. In this article, we argue that more attention should be devoted to choosing spatial units to increase the potential of resilience measures. In particular, we consider a smaller spatial unit, such as the municipality level, to better visualize resilience’s variations. In addition, by complementing measures of resilience with a measure of accessibility, we try to depict the municipality’s economic functioning. We have carried out experiments with reference to the system of the 290 municipalities in Sweden. Our municipality-level analyses reveal that (a) proxies of resilience and accessibility, in general, are positively and significantly correlated and that the municipalities estimated to be most resilient and accessible are also the major economic centers in Sweden, and (b) classifying the municipality position in ranks of proxies for resilience and accessibility is more useful for the classification of municipalities with differential resilience than classifying municipalities using proxies for resilience alone. For example, whereas high proxy values for resilience and high accessibility municipalities often are both job- and population-rich, municipalities with low resilience estimates and high accessibility indices can typically be depicted as suburban and commuting municipalities in metropolitan areas. While municipalities with estimates of poor resilience and poor accessibility can in general be used to categorize remote municipalities experiencing population loss, estimated low resilience and high accessibility are characteristics of municipalities increasing in population. This analysis combining estimates of resilience and accessibility can be considered a suitable tool for providing a more complete insight into the economic investigation and measurement of resilience.