2025/01/06 by Harry Garretsen, Michael Kitson, Chun Yang · 2 voices · 1 citation
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Regional resilience and development #Fiscal Policy and Economic Growth #Regional Development and Policy
paper · doi:10.1093/cjres/rsae047
openalex publication_date 2025/01/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/23
The world has recently faced a series of shocks and crises, including the COVID pandemic, the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and the rise of more inward-looking political regimes and policies. These are shocks that coincide with long-standing trends of real income stagnation for some and poverty for many, and also with persistent spatial inequalities within and between countries. Furthermore, these crisis episodes intersect and overlap with many long-term structural shifts or megatrends including global warming, unprecedented technological change, demographical changes and, more generally, a trend towards a spatially fragmented economic and political world order. This issue of the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society considers how such crises and megatrends may have major socio-economic impacts on cities, regions and countries. Some observers claim that the world has changed fundamentally including suffering from an unprecedented polycrisis, see for instance the views expressed by the historian Adam Tooze.1 Others are more cautious and believe that from an historical perspective, there is nothing exceptional or permanent about the current turmoil per se (Frankopan, 2025). Next to this introduction, the contributions to this issue (11 papers and 3 commentaries) reflect and take stock as to what the spatial impact is of various crises and megatrends. From a regional or even national perspective, the crises and megatrends are typically given or exogenous in the sense that individual cities or regions do not cause these events, but they basically face the task of responding or adapting to the challenges put in front of them. Hence, the title for our issue ‘Global Forces and Local Impacts’ since the papers and commentaries that make up our issue mainly deal with the question of what the local or regional impact is of these external or global crises and megatrends. This is not the first issue of the CJRES that has as its main theme the local or spatial impact of global shocks or crises. The rise of China and in particular China’s belt and road initiative was for instance the topic of the issue edited by Brakman et al. (2019), and the spatial consequences of deglobalization was the central theme in the issue edited by Gong et al. (2022). In the issue edited by Gray et al. (2023), the key question was the spatial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Similarly, the notion of local or regional resilience and how regions can be resilient to crises and structural change was the central topic of an issue edited by Martin et al. (2015). Likewise, a recent issue on ‘left behind places’, see Fiorentino et al. (2024), deals inter alia with the question of how global development may reinforce spatial inequalities at the local level. This issue on ‘global forces and local impact’ differs from previous issues as it does not focus on a particular crisis, structural change or type of regional development. Instead, it is centred around the idea that in today’s turbulent times, many crises and (mega)trends co-exist simultaneously and, crucially, are interconnected. As the papers and commentaries in this issue make clear, the regional development implications of ‘global forces’ that hit regions are best understood by acknowledging that, more often than not, the various crises and trends are interdependent. To position the various contributions and the overall theme of the issue, this introduction has three distinct objectives. The first is to explain conceptually what we do have in mind when we refer to global forces and local impact. As we argue, crises and megatrends are not the same type of ‘global force’ and similarly, we will explain that ‘local impact’ is best analysed from a multi-level spatial perspective (in the next section). Crises such as a war or a pandemic are sudden shocks that have an immediate local impact and also typically call for an immediate reaction by local agents, be it regional policymakers, firms or citizens. Many of the papers in this issue deal with the local impact of crises, or in other words with the resilience of regions are to such shocks (Martin and Sunley, 2015). Crises should be distinguished from more gradual, systemic changes or so-called ‘megatrends’ that also can be classified under the heading ‘global forces’ such as demographic changes, climate change or technological change. Here, the local impact is not sudden, and the local reaction is usually long-term. The conceptual difference between crises and megatrends when discussing the local impact of global forces is important and it helps to better position the various contributions to this issue. Next to this conceptual difference, there is a second conceptual difference that matters—the spatial level or observational unit at which the local impact of crises and/or megatrends occurs and is subsequently analysed: is one interested in the impact at the international, national, regional or even the individual firm or worker level? The second objective is to provide a short primer on what we consider to be the main megatrends, which is a useful benchmark for the papers and commentaries in this issue (third section). When discussing a global crisis, its meaning is usually quite clear and well-understood. However, the concept of megatrends tends to be less straightforward or clearly defined. The contributions in this CJRES issue take various megatrends as their starting point and often as a given and are primarily concerned with their local or spatial impact. To offer a systematic view on megatrends, the third section discusses and in more for the papers in this issue. The third and objective of this introduction is to the individual contributions which are in the this introduction with some that also as a to the of the issue. 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