A Study on the Economic Resilience of Industrial Parks

The development of globalization has brought about obvious differences in the resilience of different regions against economic crises. Regional economic resilience refers to the ability of a region’s economy to resist shocks when faced with external disturbances or to break away from its existing growth model in favor of a better path, Resilience represents the region’s adaptability, innovation, and sustainability. This paper describes an empirical analysis on the 60 designated industrial park developments under the Industrial Development Bureau in Taiwan. Over a period of short-term disturbances, the industrial parks are analyzed from four aspects: industrial structure, regional development foundation, enterprise competitiveness and labor conditions, and government governance and policy systems. Through discriminant analysis, we analyze the characteristics of factors that mainly affect the economic resilience of 60 industrial parks faced with shocks such as the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008, the five-day work week in 2016, and the COVID-19 outbreak in 2019. We found that industrial structure, specifically diversified industrial structure, is the major factor behind enhanced regional economic resilience. If the scale of specialized industries is large enough, they can form sufficient capacity to resist external changes and also be economically resilient. Under the negative impact, the amount of innovation can be an important part of post-disaster recovery, and stable innovation input will become a main factor for the sustainable development of industrial parks. The pressure of the uncertainty of global economic development and the transformation and upgrading of the domestic economy underscore that enterprises urgently need automation and digital transformation to enhance their competitiveness. In order to enhance economic resilience to adapt to changes in the overall environment, the industrial parks need to adjust adaptively, improve their industrial structure, and promote innovation, hoping that the regional economy will move towards a more stable and sustainable development path.