Resilient, bouncing back or trapped?

Industrial restructuring is a place-based process, shaped by the geographic concentration of sectors. Place-specific shocks, such as mass layoffs, add to the uneven geography of industrial restructuring. This paper identifies places exposed to intensified industrial restructuring pressure (IRP) and maps their socio-economic adjustment patterns, highlighting distinct trajectories of labour market adaptation. The analysis draws on a novel index, presented in the accompanying methodological paper Measuring industrial restructuring pressure in regions, capturing IRP episodes across different countries, time periods and types of shock. The IRP index aggregates employment outflows in declining sectors and puts additional weight on sectorally concentrated outflows. The index is applied to 449 urban labour markets in six OECD countries (Finland, France, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, and United States), over the period 1975 to 2023. Using the new IRP index, this paper examines how different places respond to restructuring pressures and explores structural factors that shape these trajectories.