Regional economic resilience, trophic characteristics, and ecological analogies

Works on regional resilience have at times borrowed from the engineering and ecological framing of system resilience. In ecological contexts, system resilience is rooted in network structure and its characteristics. Here, we empirically investigate the relationship between regional economic resilience and regional trophic characteristics across regional and national boundaries. We consider 249 NUTS2 regions across 24 countries during the 2000-2010 period. We observe strong links between regional resilience and trophic metrics borrowed from the ecological literature. Our results further highlight regional trophic characteristics as a spatially heterogeneous intermediary for feedback effects between economic structure and output of regions.