Industrial sources and unevenness of regional employment resilience in Japan

Given the increase in the importance of measuring the degree and source of resilience after great shocks, resilience has garnered researchers’ attention. However, there is no generally agreed-upon measurement for resilience; the existing approach holds few industrial assessments for resilience. This study provides a structural sensitivity index to measure the industrial sources of regional employment resilience and applies it to the Japanese economy between 1980 and 2012. It presents a novel formula that quantifies the sources of regional resilience by within-sector and structural change effects and extracts how unevenly different local industries con-tribute to regional resilience. Exploring the industrial and quantitative aspects of employment resilience chronally and geographically reveals that Japanese prefectures gradually became resilient after the 1990s, increasing the regional heterogeneity. Moreover, the structural change effect has constantly hurt the regional resilience, offsetting some favourable within-sector effects. Finally, the increasing regional heterogeneity behind improvements in resilience accompanies industrial unevenness from different time horizons, but the overall relationship between industrial unevenness and resilience is not unique from a different spatial perspective.