Economic Resilience

Economic resilience refers to an economy's ability to swiftly resume its core functions when impacted by a crisis, thereby minimising the duration during which it is unable to fulfil its core functions. This can include adapting its structures to become more resilient to future challenges.

Resilience, derived from the Latin verb "resiliere", was first introduced by Holling (1973) in ecology, who defined it as the general stability of a system and distinguished between engineering resilience, the ability of a system with one equilibrium to restore its pre-shock state quickly, and ecological resilience, the ability of a system with multiple equilibria to absorb a shock and persist in a different state. However, both definitions are static and inadequate for dynamic socio-economic systems. Consequently, the term adaptive resilience emerged to describe the positive adaptability of a system in maintaining its core functions while changing its overall structure to learn from shocks and “bounce-forward”.

Economic Resilience

Further reading & resources

Developing a theoretical framework to assess the resilience of economies in the face of crises, going beyond the traditional use of GDP as a reference measure, Hafele et al., 2023a.

The Economic Resilience Index (ERI): assessing EU economies’ future-preparedness to thrive when faced with continuous crises, Hafele et al., 2023b.

Understanding the economy as a provisioning system to analyse the differences between levels of resource use and social outcomes, Fanning et al., 2020.

Developing a policy framework for societal resilience in the EU, Manca et al., 2017.