Testing and Quantifying Economic Resilience

ABSTRACT Assessing whether an economy returns to its pre‐crisis growth path is central to the study of economic resilience, yet standard econometric tools are difficult to apply to global crises: they require a cross‐section of unaffected control economies and are vulnerable to bias when persistence is estimated from data containing structural breaks. We develop a formal testing procedure that overcomes both limitations by constructing a counterfactual no‐crisis trajectory from pre‐crisis data alone and comparing the realized path against forecast intervals. Building on this test, we propose two unit‐free measures, shock absorption and cumulative recovery. Applying the framework to real GDP for 18 advanced OECD economies, we find that most were not resilient to the Global Financial Crisis but recovered strongly from COVID‐19, which combined deeper troughs with faster rebounds. These contrasting episodes indicate that resilience is not governed by a single set of determinants and depends on the nature of the crisis.