REGIONAL DIGITAL RESILIENCE AS AN OBJECT OF INSTITUTIONAL AND ECONOMIC SUPPORT UNDER CRISIS AND POST-CRISIS TRANSFORMATIONS

Abstract

The article substantiates regional digital resilience as an autonomous meso-level category of regional economics and as an object of institutional and economic support under crisis and post-crisis transformations. The relevance of the topic stems from the fact that, under the impact of wartime, infrastructural, socio-economic and cyber shocks, the digital subsystem of a region has ceased to be an auxiliary instrument of service modernisation and has become a critical precondition for territorial life support, for the continuity of public and private services and for the preservation of institutional governability. The purpose of the study is to provide a theoretical and conceptual substantiation of regional digital resilience, to disclose its content and to determine its place within the system of institutional and economic mechanisms of regional development. The methodological basis comprises the propositions of regional economics and institutional economic theory, the evolutionary concept of economic resilience, the adaptive cycle approach, as well as the methods of scientific abstraction, comparative categorical analysis, systematisation and structural-functional modelling; the empirical basis includes official assessments of damage and recovery needs, cyber incident statistics, measurement data on the digital transformation of regions and communities, and the regulatory acts of Ukraine and the European Union. The study results in an original definition of regional digital resilience formulated through the proximate genus and the specific difference, in its differentiation from digital transformation, digital maturity, cyber resilience, digital operational resilience and national resilience, in a two-dimensional structural model that combines four functional phases of resilience – resistance, recovery, re-orientation and renewal – with five components of the regional digital subsystem, and in the identification of seven subsystems of institutional and economic support. The scientific novelty consists in singling out regional digital resilience as an autonomous meso-level category that differs from adjacent concepts in the scale of analysis, the temporal logic and the key research question, and in substantiating its matrix-based operationalisation. The theoretical significance of the work lies in extending the conceptual apparatus of regional economics with the digital dimension of resilience; the practical significance lies in creating the basis for developing a system of indicators and an integral index of regional digital resilience suitable for supporting regional policy, crisis management and post-crisis recovery planning.