Quality of government and regional resilience in the European Union. Evidence from the Great Recession

This paper examines the relationship between quality of government and regional resilience in the European Union during the Great Recession. The results show that the quality of government is an important factor when shaping the regional reaction to the crisis. Our estimates reveal that higher quality of government is associated with greater regional resilience over the Great Recession. This is partly due to the role played in this context by spatial spillovers induced by the quality of government in neighbouring regions. The observed link between governance and regional resilience is robust to the inclusion in the analysis of different explanatory variables that may affect both government quality and regional resilience. Likewise, our findings do not depend on the specific dimension of governance considered, the estimation method or the econometric specification employed to capture the nature of spatial spillovers. This research has benefited from the financial support of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Projects ECO2015-64330-P and ECO2016-76681-R).