Assessing the Agricultural Sector’s Resilience to the 2008 Economic Crisis: The Case of Greece

Abstract

This paper studies the resilience of the agricultural sector compared to eight other sectors of the Greek economy. The analysis is based on a multilevel methodological framework aiming to integrate equilibrium and evolutionary approaches by incorporating temporal (recovery and adaptability), geographical (regional resilience), and sectorial (industrial resilience) aspects, quantified concerning the 2008 economic crisis. Within this composite context, resilience is measured on GVA data according to a dual-axis: horizontally, in terms of measuring the recovering time or the time of transition to a new state of functionality due to a shock, and vertically, in terms of capturing the variability caused by the shock, approximating the system’s adaptability. The analysis shows that the agricultural sector in Greece is generally resilient; although, it has not retained its pre-crisis maximum performance, and it has the smallest Gross Value Added magnitude and the most uneven distribution across the regional dimension. Overall, the analysis promotes the methodological conceptualization of regional resilience and provides insights into the case study of the structural analysis of the Greek rural economy.

Keywords

• rural economy
• regional economy
• economic crisis
• Theil index decomposition
• shift-share analysis