For a long time, regional economic resilience research has been rooted in the European evolutionary economic geography paradigm, which is suitable for explaining the endogenous adaptation process, capabilities and mechanisms of regional economy in the context of shocks. However, the evolutionary paradigm lacks a multi-scale correlation perspective and is difficult to explain the exogenous problems of regional economic resilience. Currently, the global geopolitical economy is facing reconstruction, and the global supply chain, industrial chain and value chain are being reorganized. Regions embedded in the Global Production Network cannot remain unaffected, and the explanatory shortcomings of evolutionary resilience have become prominent. This paper combines the literature on supply chain resilience, industrial chain resilience and value chain resilience, proposes a "chain resilience" perspective, distinguishes the differences between it and the evolutionary resilience perspective in terms of problem focus, research scale, influencing factors and method selection, refines the perspective advantages of "chain resilience", and constructs a new framework for regional economic resilience research under the "chain perspective". This framework emphasizes: (1) It is necessary to analyze the presupposed role of shock attributes on regional economic resilience; (2) For specific shock situations, the ability, object, goal and approach of regional economic adaptation can be analyzed from two dimensions: structural and agency factors, and regional and external factors; (3) Taking the place and the various economic chains and networks it is embedded in as the core object and logical starting point for analyzing regional resilience, focusing on understanding the positionality, opportunism and agency of the local economy in the chain/network before and after the shock.
Regional economic resilience, as a hot topic within the field of evolutionary economic geography, has accumulated a substantial body of theoretical and empirical achievements, yet its conceptual connotations remain ambiguous. Many scholars' understanding of regional economic resilience is rooted in the context of other disciplines, lacking an analysis of the relationship between concepts within the context of regional development. In empirical analysis, sensitivity indices centered on GDP and employment are widely used to measure regional economic resilience, but this approach is still limited by an equilibrium perspective, resulting in a disconnect between theory and empirical findings. This paper attempts to review the progress in research on regional economic resilience, clarify the connotations of resilience, relationships between concepts, and measurement methods. It looks forward to future research topics from the perspectives of integrating static and dynamic approaches, involving multiple actors, and identifying dynamic adaptive capacities, aiming to provide new theoretical and empirical perspectives for the study of regional economic resilience.
Economic resilience is vital for coal resource-based cities to cope with external shocks and strive for transition and sustainable development. Given the relatedness and interactiveness of multi-dimensional factors and capabilities of coal resource-based cities, it is of great theoretical and practical value to facilitate a better understanding of their economic resilience from the perspective of synergetics. Considering the research gaps faced by the existing studies, this study therefore attempts to establish an analytical framework and measurement approach for the economic resilience of coal resource-based cities through the lens of synergetics, and then apply it to an empirical case study of Huaibei City in Anhui Province. The findings are as follows: (1) As for the analytical framework, the economic resilience of coal resource-based cities is understood as an evolutionary process characterized by symbiosis, orderliness, and dynamics, which gradually mitigate the negative impacts of internal and external shocks by the synergistic effects among resistance, adaptation, and transformation capabilities, and is shaped by the non-linear effects among coal resources, economic development, and ecological environment. (2) As for the measurement approach, the economic resilience evaluation index system of coal resource-based cities is comprised of coal resources, economic development, and ecological environment, following the logic of assessment specified as "coal resource reservation and consumption, economic transformation and upgrading, and ecological environment restoration." (3) As for the empirical case study, the performance of the economic resilience of Huaibei City is featured as dynamic and fluctuant, with alignment with its resource-based urban life cycle, and the synergies among resistance, adaptation, and transformation capabilities effectively render the positive changes of the economic resilience of Huaibei City.
In the complex context of globalization and geopolitics, the global economic system is facing unprecedented challenges. The Yangtze River Delta region, as an important growth pole of China's economic development, has a strong or weak economic resilience that directly relates to the overall stability and growth potential of China's economy. This paper measures the economic resilience of the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration using the multi-indicator core variable method, analyzes its dynamic evolution characteristics from the three process dimensions of resistance, recoverability, and renewal, and reveals its spatial evolution characteristics through the Dagum Gini coefficient, Moran's I, and other methods. The research shows: (1) The overall economic development level of the Yangtze River Delta region is relatively high, having experienced a trend of rising, falling, fluctuating, and then rising again, with increasing regional economic development disparities; (2) The differences in economic resilience levels within the provinces are Zhejiang Province < Jiangsu Province < Anhui Province, showing a certain spatial agglomeration trend with significant provincial differences; (3) The economic resilience levels in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration initially show a dominant pattern of high-low agglomeration and low-low agglomeration, which gradually decreases over time, with low-high agglomeration and high-high agglomeration types being less distributed; (4) The economic resilience level in the Yangtze River Delta region has been fluctuating and growing over the past fifteen years, demonstrating strong resilience capabilities in both the resistance and renewal phases.
In the context of economic globalization, black swan events such as economic crises, natural disasters, public health emergencies, and trade disputes frequently occur, severely impacting the healthy development of regional economies. Currently, regional economic resilience has become a hot topic in academic circles. As one of the regions in China with the highest degree of openness, studying the characteristics of economic resilience and risk response strategies in the Pearl River Delta holds significant practical significance. This paper, focusing on economic resilience from both internal and external perspectives, takes the Pearl River Delta as the research object and deeply explores the main influencing factors and evolutionary mechanisms of regional economic resilience. First, the study uses a single-indicator measurement method to analyze the economic resilience levels and characteristics of the nine cities in the Pearl River Delta. Second, it employs multiple regression and moderation effect models to explore the mechanisms through which industrial diversification and the degree of strategic coupling affect regional economic resilience, further investigating the moderating role of innovation efficiency in the impact of related industrial diversification. The results show that: (1) The economic resilience levels of the Pearl River Delta decrease from the center to the periphery, and can be divided into three tiers, with the first tier being Shenzhen, the second tier including Guangzhou, Foshan, Zhuhai, Dongguan, and Huizhou, and the third tier comprising Zhongshan, Jiangmen, and Zhaoqing; (2) The level of urban economic resilience is highly positively correlated with the mode of strategic coupling, i.e., cities with higher autonomous coupling modes also have higher levels of economic resilience; (3) There is a "U-shaped" nonlinear relationship between related industrial diversification and regional economic resilience; (4) Innovation capability can enhance both the positive and negative effects of related industrial diversification on regional economic resilience. Based on the empirical analysis, the paper proposes relevant strategies and suggestions to enhance the economic resilience of the Pearl River Delta.
Regional economic resilience is the key to explaining the regional economic system's economic stability, transformation, and recovery in the uncertain shock environments. The paper takes the complex system of Shandong Peninsula urban agglomeration as the research object and measures regional economic resilience in the face of different attribute shocks in 2007-2022 by constructing the resistance and recoverability index. The spatiotemporal heterogeneity of the influencing factors of regional economic resilience was explored with the help of geographically and temporally weighted autoregressive model. The results show that: (1) The economic resilience characteristics of Shandong Peninsula urban agglomeration in response to different attribute shocks vary greatly, the economic resilience ability to cope with the financial crisis is lower, and the urban agglomeration is more vulnerable to such shocks, while the ability to resist pandemic shock is higher; (2) Under the financial crisis, the number of low-resistance cities in Shandong Peninsula urban agglomeration has increased and showing the characteristics of continuous distribution in space. The ability of regional economic system to update or breakthrough the path of development is poor. Under the pandemic shock, the resistance of Shandong Peninsula urban agglomeration shows regional differences. Jinan and Qingdao and their surrounding areas show the characteristics of high resistance concentration distribution, and the eastern coastal areas respond better to the shock; (3) The roles of structural and agency-based factors have spatiotemporal heterogeneity, and the effects are obviously different under different attribute shocks. Especially under the pandemic shock, the role of agency-based factors is more important. Even in different stages of the same shock situation, the effects of factors are significantly different.
Service industries is the leading industry of Hainan's economic development. This article centers on the development strategy of Hainan Province since the establishment of the province, based on the panel data of 18 cities and counties in Hainan from 1988 to 2021, using Arcgis10.8 and SPSS22.0 software, through the improvement of the entropy value method, exploratory spatial data analysis and other methods to study the level of development of the service industry, spatial variability and correlation among the cities and counties in Hainan Province in different development periods. The study shows that: (1) in general, the level of service industry development in Hainan shows a trend of growth, and the gap in the level of service industry development between cities and counties is gradually decreasing; (2) there is obvious spatial heterogeneity in the change of the level of development of the service industry in Hainan Province, in which Haikou in the northeast and Sanya in the south have the highest level of development of the service industry, followed by the northwestern and eastern parts of the country. (3) The development status of fixed asset investment, tourism development and import and export trade has a greater impact on the development of Hainan's service industry.
Both geographical proximity and technological relatedness (or knowledge variety) are critical for regional industrial innovation. However, the existing economic geography literature rarely examine the effects of proximity and relatedness together, as most studies focus on technological relatedness within the same region or the proximity of the same types of knowledge. This article constructs a multi-scalar framework to integrate the effects of spatial spillover, variety in local knowledge base and technological relatedness of external knowledge linkages on innovation performance. The different types of variety variables for local and external knowledge are measured by entropy indicators using the patent data issued by the National Intellectual Property Administration of China (CNIPA). Spatial Panel Durbin Model is used to empirically investigate how relatedness of local knowledge bases and external linkages affect electronic information industrial innovation in the Yangtze River Delta, China. The main findings of this study are as follows. (1) Both related and unrelated variety of local knowledge base significantly promote electronic information industrial innovation in the Yangtze River Delta. This finding offers support for Jacobs's externalities theory from the perspective of geographical proximity. The innovation effect of related variety is stronger than unrelated variety, which indicates that an appropriate cognitive distance can improve the effect of local knowledge on industrial innovation. (2) The higher the similarity between the technological composition of the local knowledge and that of the collaborated regions, the higher the impact on the electronic information industrial innovation. The relatedness variable accounting for related variety in cross-regional technology collaboration weighted by the local knowledge base does not significantly correlate with industrial innovation. Thus, it seems that the external knowledge spillover for innovation mainly occurs among regions with similar knowledge bases rather than diversified technological composition. (3) The electronic information industrial innovation in the Yangtze River Delta shows significant spatial agglomeration. Driven by regional economic integration mechanism, local industrial innovation has a positive and significant spatial spillover effect on surrounding cities.
