Spatiotemporal Evolution Characteristics and Influencing Factors of Industrial Resilience in the Yangtze River Delta, China: Evidence from Firm-Level Data

Industry is a core pillar of regional economic development, and a resilient industrial structure is a crucial lever for stabilizing the economy. This study constructs an analytical framework for regional industrial resilience from three dimensions: resistance, recovery, and reconstruction, and examines its spatiotemporal evolution and influencing factors in the Yangtze River Delta, China, from 2008 to 2022. Using micro-level enterprise data from 484 028 industrial enterprises, industrial resilience is measured from the perspectives of enterprise survival, enterprise entry, industrial diversification, and industrial upgrading. Spatial analysis and panel regression models are then employed to identify its temporal evolution, spatial differentiation, and influencing factors. The results show that: 1) industrial resilience experienced three distinct stages: an adjustment and decline phase during 2008–2013, a rebound during 2014–2017, and a decline under multiple pressures during 2018–2022. 2) In 2022, industrial resilience exhibited marked spatial disparities, with a pattern of ‘higher in the southeast and lower in the northwest’. However, from 2008 to 2018, peripheral areas tended to cluster at high resilience values, whereas core cities showed greater fluctuations. 3) The influencing mechanisms differed across industrial resilience and its three sub-dimensions. Industrial output scale and innovation output capacity had significant positive effects on overall industrial resilience, while innovation output capacity also significantly promoted resistance and recovery but had no significant effect on reconstruction. This study provides a micro-level perspective for understanding the multidimensional evolution of regional industrial resilience and highlights the differentiated roles of economic, industrial, and technological factors in shaping resilience.