Matías Mayor (University of Oviedo) : “Resilience, path dependenceand path breaking in old industrial regions".

Abstract:

Since Grabher’s (1993) seminal study, path dependence has been a concept increasingly employed to explain regional development, initially to account for lock-in situations. More recently, evolutionary economic geography has extended its application not only for the explanation of lock-in situations, but of different evolving scenarios as well. Path dependence, broadly defined, may have both negative and positive effects on regional economic performance and can be used to explain why change goes in a particular direction (Martin and Sunley, 2006; Martin, 2010; Henning et al., 2013). Path dependence and lock in are particularly evident in old industrial regions that have faced several important dilemmas of adaptation (Birch, Mackinnon and Cumbers, 2010) and followed different industrial paths (Isaksen et al., 2019). Regional economic structure, resources and capabilities, along with soft factors such as institutions, social capital and agency play a decisive role in the path development of regions.

This paper aims to study the resilience and adaptation of two old industrial regions of the north of Spain, Asturias and the Basque Country, to the main shocks and structural changes experienced over the last fifty years, particularly, the three economic crises of 1976-1984, 1992-1994 and 2008-2013, and to the deindustrialization process that has happened in the European economies. The paper employs a double methodology, quantitative (shift share analysis) to examine the resilience and resistance of two regions in terms of employment, in the broader context of Spanish regions; and qualitative, which focuses on the role of industrial policies implemented in both regions and of the most outstanding agents of each territory. The cases of Asturias and the Basque Country are good examples of, respectively, path dependence and path breaking in regional development. Like in other works (Blazek and Kveton, 2023; Steen et al., 2023), the comparative analysis attempts to explore the factors that account for the different path development of each region over the last fifty years.