Regional Resilience in China: The Response of the Provinces to the Growth Slowdown^∗

This paper focuses on the province-level experience of China’s growth slowdown using the notion of regional economic resilience. We first use standard resilience measures based on growth rates and compute the correlation between these measures and a number of determinants. We then decompose growth into national and provincial components and argue that resilience ought to be based only on the former. This extension is important both for ranking provinces and for the correlation analysis. We find that provinces close to the coast with new-rather than old-industry structures were less resilient and suffered greater growth variability.