Regional Employment Growth, Shocks and Regional Industrial Resilience: A Quantitative Analysis of the Danish ICT Sector

Abstract

The resilience of regional industries to economic shocks has gained a lot of attention in evolutionary economic geography recently. This paper uses a novel quantitative approach to investigate the regional industrial resilience of the Danish ICT sector to the shock following the burst of the dot-com bubble. It is shown that regions characterised by small and young ICT service companies were more adaptable and grew more than others, while diversity and urbanisation increased the sensitivity to the business cycle after the shock. Different types of resilient regions are found: adaptively resilient, rigidly resilient, entrepreneurially resilient and non-resilient regions.

Keywords: Resilience, Regional economic growth, ICT sector, Business cycle, Shocks

JEL Classification: R11, O18, E32, L86