Heterogeneous economic resilience and the great recession's world trade collapse

This special section aims to fill a gap in the regional resilience literature and to stimulate future spatial studies of resilience to include the international dimension in empirical analyses. It demonstrates the do-ability and relevance by the natural experience of the global trade collapse that allows us to separate the effect of collapse upon event and ex post recovery because no ex ante resilience measures were taken. This is a great methodological advantage with respect to the literature on natural disasters and financial crises that is confronted with the difficulty of identifying resilience because of ex ante measures (prevention or inherent resilience measures) and ex post measures (recovery or adaptive resilience measures).