Dimitrios TSIOTAS
Assistant Professor, Department of Regional and Economic Development; Agricultural University of Athens; Drosou Kravvartogiannou, Nea Poli; Amfissa 33100, Greece,
tsiotas@aua.gr
(Corresponding Author)
Thomas KRABOKOUKIS
Ph.D, Department of Planning and Regional Development, University of Thessaly, Pedion Areos, Volos, 38334, Greece,
tkrabokoukis@uth.gr
Dimitrios KANTIANIS
Assistant Professor, Department of Business Administration, School of Business, University of the Aegean, 8, Michalon St., GR-82132 Chios, Greece;
dkantianis@aegean.gr
Abstract
The resilience of spatial economies is driven by a high degree of complexity, as the behavior of economic systems, both in response to disturbances from their external environment and to the transformative dynamics that develop internally, is a multivariable process depending on economic, structural, social, geographic, environmental, institutional, political, and other related factors. Conceptualizing the inherent capacity of economic systems to resist, recover, adapt, or evolve when faced with different types and forms of disturbances, the study of regional economic resilience can shed light both on the mechanisms promoting regional development and on the design of more targeted regional policy actions. Assuming that an economic crisis can be interpreted as a ‘disturbance’ to the functional equilibrium of open economies, this paper examines the extent to which the 2008 economic crisis affected the resilience of Greece’s regions in terms of their tourism demand. The study focuses on tourism, considered one of the country’s key economic sectors, and analyzes tourism demand data (accommodation occupancy) and annual employment for the period January 2000 – December 2018, using a three-dimensional (3D) economic resilience index recently proposed by Tsiotas and Katsaiti (2025), along with location quotients and statistical analysis techniques. The research investigates the extent to which a region’s sectoral specialization is related to aspects of its economic resilience in tourism demand, providing insights into the spatial asymmetry that generally characterizes the relationship between a region’s basic sector and the vulnerability of its economy due to its core specialization.
Keywords: three-dimensional (3D) economic resilience index, engineering resilience, ecological resilience, evolutionary resilience, regional economics and development, tourism economics and development
JEL classification: R11, R15, R58, Z32
pp. 101-116