Networks and Resilience: Essays on the Economic Structure of European Regions

Regions have become a central focus of economics in recent times. This is partly due to the recognition that regions are now no longer seen as merely artificial boundaries of geographical areas but increasingly as complex systems. As a result, regions have come to represent the industries, technologies, and knowledge they encompass. The concept of relatedness-based knowledge space in the literature provides a good approximation of the distribution of skills and technologies that can be found in regions. Yet little is known about regions' global embeddedness or intrinsic robustness. As such, this dissertation aims to deepen further our understanding of the inter-regional networks that link regions and the intra-regional networks that describe the internal structure of regions. The dissertation collects three essays using the concepts of proximity, resilience, knowledge- and industry-space and provides a new basis for them. First, we constructed a Europe-wide inter-regional collaboration network. We computed proximity dimensions between each pair of regions, such as geographical distance, technological similarity, and social proximity. Our analysis helps to map which factors lead to the emergence of inter-regional collaboration, and we showed the importance of these factors to understand the spatial fragmentation of the European innovation system. Next, we assessed the network robustness of the capability base of 269 European metropolitan areas and 72 Swedish labour market regions against the potential elimination of some of their capabilities. By systematically decomposing the capability structure of these regions, we quantified their resilience potentials. This part has two added values. The first one is that we could give an ex-ante resilience measure of a region before a crisis breaks out. The second one, we have established the link between a region's technological-industrial network and the change in employment in response to a crisis.

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