International crises, national scale, and economic resilience in the 21st century

Abstract

Based on the theoretical connotation of economic resilience, this article constructs an evaluation system of 21 basic indicators-including economic development level, territorial area, and total grain output-to assess economic resilience. Using the entropy method, we calculated the economic resilience, resistance resilience, and recovery resilience of 47 countries from 2006 to 2022, and conducted an in-depth analysis of the development trends of economic resilience across countries of different scales. Furthermore, the TVP-VAR model was employed to investigate the impact of economic resilience on economic development under the shocks of international crises in the 21st century. The results indicate that although global economic resilience was impacted by multiple crises, it generally showed a fluctuating upward trend. The 2008 global financial crisis and the 2014–2016 El Niño event primarily affected resistance resilience. However, the former led to a decrease in the average level of global economic resilience, while the latter only slowed its rate of improvement. The COVID-19 pandemic caused a global production halt, resulting in significant declines in both resistance and recovery resilience. National scale factors—such as governance capacity, population size, territorial area, gross domestic product, global economic influence, and income level—significantly influence economic resilience. Large countries can leverage their scale advantages to demonstrate strong resilience. International crises have triggered imbalances in global economic resilience and significantly impacted national economic development, with varying effects depending on the scale of the economy. Large countries experienced shorter shock durations and quicker recoveries, whereas small economies faced longer and more unstable recovery processes.