Resilience and Sectoral Composition Change of Italian Inner Areas in Response to the Great Recession

This paper focuses on the response of Italian inner areas to the Great Recession. Inner areas represent the majority of the Italian territory and are very heterogeneous in terms of (unstable) growth trajectories and industrial composition. One key issue that has partially hindered a thorough empirical analysis of the development paths of these areas so far, is defining these inner areas. To this aim, we adopt the recent classification proposed by the National Strategy for Inner Areas (2014), which identified six categories based on the travel distance from service provision centers. Our purpose is to analyze the potential structural change of inner vs non-inner areas in the face of the 2007–2008 economic crisis, assessing their adaptive capacity to the recessionary disturbance and the factors underlying their industrial composition change. We found that urban poles and inner areas had different abilities to re-adapt their local industrial compositions in response to the economic crisis with obvious effects on their future resilience.