Resistance, recovery and resilience in the industrial sector: Catalonia and Emilia-Romagna compared, 1970s-2020s

This paper contributes to the expanding literature on regional resilience by comparing two southern European regions. Through an analysis of fluctuations in industrial value added and industrial employment in Catalonia and Emilia-Romagna, we assess the extent to which their industrial sectors were similarly affected by the major economic crises of the past fifty years—from the 1973 oil shock to the Covid-19 pandemic. Furthermore, we ex-amine the capacity of each region’s industrial sector to recover following these shocks. Across the six major crises experienced by Western economies, our findings reveal notable regional dif-ferences in resistance, depending on whether value added or employment is used as the primary indicator. We also find that, since the early 2000s, Emilia-Romagna has consistently exhibited stronger recovery performance from shock-induced losses than Catalonia, reversing the pattern observed during the 1980s and 1990s. We also offer several hypotheses to account for this divergent trajectory in industrial resilience.