Different impacts of similar crises? The financial and COVID-19 crisis in border and non-border regions

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The last two decades have seen an increase in the number and intensity of shocks and crises. The financial crisis of 2008/2009 and the COVID-19 crisis of 2020/2021 have led to economic recessions. During the COVID-19 crisis, national borders and the impact of crises in border regions were often the subject of political debate and media coverage. Border-regional resilience has only been discussed in the academic discourse for the last few years. This article uses a diverse set of socio-economic indicators to examine the (border)–regional resilience of German regions in the wake of the financial crisis and the COVID-19 crisis. A distinction is made between border and non-border regions, urban and rural regions, and regions in the old and new German federal states. The results show, first, that the COVID-19 crisis had a stronger socio-economic impact than the financial crisis. Second, border regions tended to be more affected by the financial crisis than non-border regions. Surprisingly, this was not the case for the border-specific COVID-19 crisis. Moreover, the study shows that it is not so much the border location that determines regional resilience, but rather the socio-economic level, the degree of urbanization and the associated embeddedness in global networks.