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).