BACKGROUND
The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has struck global economies profoundly. The Global Economic Prospects published by the World Bank estimated that the world economy might have contracted by 4.3% in 2020. Such a degree of economic recession is only surpassed by the two World Wars and the Great Depression (World Bank, 2021). While the longer-term global economy, in general, is expected to suffer, the IMF (IMF, 2020) in its latest World Economic Outlook also raises concerns about the uneven recovery among different countries. Oxford Economics, a consultancy, has created 31 economic vulnerability measures, based on past crises, including Ebola and SARS, and the global financial crisis in 2008. According to these measures, emerging markets are expected to suffer more in the long-term than advanced economies (see The Economist, Dec 15th 2020).
Such variations reflect the different levels of resilience that countries, industries, and firms exhibit. The concept of resilience has been widely employed in different contexts, and being developed into different meanings when it comes to economic resilience.
Though economic resilience of a region or territory, in general, can be understood as ‘the ability of a local or regional economy to modify its own industrial, technological, institutional structure according to the change’ (Sabatino, 2016:1925). There remain some key questions about economic resilience that remain under-discovered: What makes a country or region resilient? What are the mechanisms that support countries or regions through crises? What should a country, region, or even individual organization do to enhance its resilience? We therefore seek to comprehensively investigate the building of economic and organizational resilience at three levels: macro, meso, and micro.
Assessment on Economic and Development Resiliencies: At the macro level, we draw insights via a comparative exercise by investigating the policy response in Tiger Economies (Taiwan, South Korea and Malaysia and India). By doing so, we can delineate the evolving state roles and strategies employed to navigate the national economy through crises.
Social resilience: At the meso level, we focus on small and medium enterprises (SMEs), illustrating how they transform business models so they can preserve resources in terms of social capital to maintain the resource density to respond to the unpredictable and devastating crises.
Resilience-oriented service design for business transformation: At the micro level, we investigate how the cultural differences manifest in the ways that employees and consumers respond to situations outside their control. More importantly, this project also stresses on the signals that shape the change from each level through the interaction between actors from different levels. Governments and industries can mitigate concerns through regulations and shaping self-regulation practices, whilst individual and firm level adaptation strategies can inspire national policy change.
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