Accessibility, population dynamics and regional economic resilience

Disruptions in a space-economy are usually irregular and may exhibit diverse patterns some of which may have a global reach and effect, whilst others may be national or just regional. Immediate effects of economic perturbations often include layoffs, soaring unemployment figures, and socioeconomic inequality, but in the long run population loss through outmigration may be inevitable; demographic dynamics is an intermediate and adaptive variable for balancing spatial-economic disequilibrium. The regional ability to cope with disturbances and changes is usually referred to as regional economic resilience and may be measured as a single or composite parameter index. Most of the traditionally used indexes measure resilience on just a regional level, disregarding factors in neighbouring regions and thereby also the effects of cross-border commuting and migration. By integrating spatial accessibility in a composite measure of resilience to ensure that also neighbouring factors are accounted for, and by taking also the size of labour demand in neighbouring regions into account, a new measure of regional economic resilience is developed that not only correlates better with the regions’ ability to retain population, but is also relatively simple to compute. This new model is tested for Sweden using data from the global financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the years that follow. The results from our study suggest that integrating spatial interdependencies into models of regional economic resilience improves our understanding of the linkage with the regions’ abilities to retain the population or even to grow in a dynamic population adjustment context.