Resilience: An Evolutionary Approach to Spatial Economic Systems

The concept of resilience has received a great deal of attention in the past decades. Starting from the first fundamental definitions offered by Holling, Pimms and Perrings in an economic-ecological modeling context, the present paper explores the evolution of the resilience concept—as well as related different measures—in both a continuous and discrete time setting.From this perspective, the paper explores the relevance of the resilience concept in socio-economic systems, by focussing the attention on the relationships among resilience, transition dynamics and lock-in effects, in particular in the light of the dynamics of technological innovation diffusion and adaptive behaviour of firms. In this framework we will describe an empirical application, in which the resilience and dynamics of the West-German labour market will be investigated. This empirical illustration is offered by making use of an algorithm constructed for detecting Lyapunov exponents, so as to classify the resilience among employment sectors in our case study.