Conceptualising and Measuring Economic Resilience
Guiding our economies to become resilient to external shocks and crises
Presently, we are experiencing a multitude of crises at once: from recent ones such as the war in Ukraine, exposing detrimental economic dependencies, or the Covid-19 pandemic and its ensuing health, social and economic crises, to older looming ones such as the ecological crisis manifesting itself in biodiversity loss and in the reduction in ecosystem services. At the same time, crises open windows of opportunity for transformation. In light of these, it is of utmost importance how we as individuals, communities, and economies respond to, cope with and adapt to the circumstances of the crisis – in short, how we build resilience.
Despite its frequent use, there is no common understanding of the term “economic resilience”. We address this problem by conceptualising economic resilience in a co-creative way. We conduct workshops and interviews with experts and policy makers to understand the determinants of economic resilience and address the needs of policymakers. To enable the measurement and monitoring of economic resilience, we then construct an economic resilience index that quantifies the conceptualisation of economic resilience. Finally, we apply the index by calculating and comparing the performance of EU Member States. Using the buy-in generated by our co-creative approach, we are in constant exchange with policy makers from the Member States.
