Regional resilience in Italy: do employment and income tell the same story?

The concept of resilience has attracted increasing interest in regional economics. In the flourishing literature, however, results are far from being conclusive, even when referring to the same case study. Undoubtedly, this mixed evidence potentially stems also from different operationalization of the multifaceted resilience concept; the main difference being between studies using GDP series and those measuring regional economic performance in terms of fluctuations in employment levels. The different choices and the subsequent results, far from being interpreted as lack of robustness, are research specific; nevertheless, it is important to address what kind of relationship – if any – exists between the two measures. To this end, we analyse and compare the results concerning the regional resilience in Italy, over the last 40 years, focussing on the differences deriving from the choice between the two aforementioned measures. Our analysis reveals that the information contained in the different series, rather than being alternative and overlapping, is complementary.