Socio-economic Resilience and the Local Background Context: Related Variety Matters

The notion of socio-economic resilience assumes a crucial role in assessing the impact of economic shocks on production structures, demographic dynamics, urbanisation and social stratification processes. Various approaches have been proposed to estimate socio-economic resilience; one of the most common techniques focuses on the degree of diversification of production structures characterising homogeneous economic systems, for instance, at regional scale. This contribution formulates a reflection on economic resilience of regional systems, considering the metropolitan region of Athens (Greece) as a case study. For this purpose, an Evenness Index was proposed to quantifying the heterogeneity of the production system in the study area taken as a measure of resilience over a short term (2002-2008), encompassing a phase of economic expansion driven by the 2004 Olympics. Based on the resulting findings, the evolution of the metropolitan production structure - examined in combination with urbanisation processes and recent dynamics of income and wealth (e.g., related to the 2007 crisis) - provides a meaningful assessment of the degree of resilience in a given area. Understanding spatio-temporal patterns of economic resilience can support the adoption of explicit developmental policies addressing specificities and local weaknesses of regional contexts.