Despite growing academic interest in informality, skills, regional performance, and resilience, these domains are rarely examined together. This paper addresses this gap by offering the first integrated literature review that links all four dimensions and their policy relevance. Given the absence of indexed studies covering all concepts simultaneously, the analysis is structured around three intersecting strands: skills and regional performance or resilience; informal employment and performance or resilience; and undeclared work and skills with policy implications. Using a bibliometric approach, the study combines R/Biblioshiny analyses with a custom agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system to explore thematic trends across a large scientific corpus. Results highlight two dominant themes (human capital and entrepreneurship, and regional development and innovation) and show that informality remains weakly integrated into skills and regional analyses. Policy insights derived from the literature are classified into three tiers: evidence-based interventions, theoretically grounded but empirically underexplored measures, and emerging ideas requiring further validation. These findings point to the need for integrated strategies that link skills development, informality, and regional resilience to support inclusive and sustainable growth.
Bolboaşă et al. (Tue,) studied this question.