Local economic resilience and economic specialization in Greece during the crisis

Abstract

AbstractThis paper scrutinizes the issue of economic resilience, aiming to detect the existence of a systematic link with economic specialization. To this end, the paper conducts an empirical analysis at the local (i.e., municipal) level of Greece during the economic crisis period (2009–2015), providing cartographic visualizations and spatial econometrics estimations. Greece is the country that was hit the hardest by the economic crisis. Thus, the need to stabilize the national economy in Greece has seemingly outweighed policy issues of spatial interest, which are also of extreme importance. The findings of the paper reveal that, inter alia, both the level and the nature of economic specialization exert an impact on local economic resilience, providing insight into both theory and policy making.