This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. This collected volume represents the final outcome of the COST Action IS1104 “The EU in the new complex geography of economic systems: models, tools and policy evaluation”. Visualizing the EU as a complex and multi-layered network, the book is organized in three parts, each of them dealing with a different level of analysis: At the macro-level, Part I considers the interactions within large economic systems (regions or countries) involving trade, workers migration, and other factor movements. At the meso-level, Part II discusses interactions within specific but wide-ranging markets, with a focus on financial markets and banking systems. Lastly, at the micro-level, Part III explores the decision-making of single firms, especially in the context of location decisions.

This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. This collected volume represents the final outcome of the COST Action IS1104 “The EU in the new complex geography of economic systems: models, tools and policy evaluation”. Visualizing the EU as a complex and multi-layered network, the book is organized in three parts, each of them dealing with a different level of analysis: At the macro-level, Part I considers the interactions within large economic systems (regions or countries) involving trade, workers migration, and other factor movements. At the meso-level, Part II discusses interactions within specific but wide-ranging markets, with a focus on financial markets and banking systems. Lastly, at the micro-level, Part III explores the decision-making of single firms, especially in the context of location decisions.

Space is a crucial variable in any economic activity. Spatial Economics is the branch of economics that explicitly aims to incorporate the space dimension in the analysis of economic phenomena. From its beginning in the last century, Spatial Economics has contributed to the understanding of the economy by developing plenty of theoretical models as well as econometric techniques having the “space” as a core dimension of the analysis. This edited volume addresses the complex issue of Spatial Economics from an applied point of view. This volume is part of a more complex project including another edited volume (Spatial Economics Volume I: Theory) collecting original papers which address Spatial Economics from a theoretical perspective.

This book argues that complexity theory offers new departures for (spatial-) economic modelling. It offers a broad overview of recent advances in non-linear dynamics (catastrophe theory, chaos theory, evolutionary theory and so forth) and illustrates the relevance of this new paradigm on the basis of several illustrations in the area of space-economy. The empirical limitations - inherent in the use of non-linear dynamic systems approaches - are also addressed. Next, the application potential of biocomputing (in particular, neural networks and evolutionary algorithms) is stressed, while various empirical model results are presented. The book concludes with an agenda for further research.

A comprehensive core text from the expert in the field introducing students to the main issues of spatial systems modelling and analysis.

Space is a crucial variable in any economic activity. Spatial Economics is the branch of economics that explicitly aims to incorporate the space dimension in the analysis of economic phenomena. From its beginning in the last century, Spatial Economics has contributed to the understanding of the economy by developing plenty of theoretical models as well as econometric techniques having the “space” as a core dimension of the analysis. This edited volume addresses the complex issue of Spatial Economics from a theoretical point of view. This volume is part of a more complex project including another edited volume (Spatial Economics Volume II: Applications) collecting original papers which address Spatial Economics from an applied perspective.

With the dawn of the twenty-first century comes the awareness that current rapid political-economic-social and technological transformations will affect our of living, by producing new forms of information, communications, common way market, work-style and leisure. In this context, human behaviour will certainly change its 'fixed' parameters. It is likely that the relationships between internal structures and external influences, between individual components and collective behaviour, as well as between multi-scale networks and interrelated dynamics, will show spatio-temporal patterns which will be difficult to predict by means of our usual tools. As a consequence, academic research is increasingly being required to play an active role in addressing new ways of understanding and forecasting the sets of interacting structures, ranging from the technical to the organizational, and from the social to the economic and political levels, while at the same time incorporating concerns about the 'new' economy, environment, society, information and technology. It is now evident that social science - especially spatial and economic scienc- needs innovative 'paths', together with continuous cross-fertilization among the many disciplines involved. In order to investigate these intriguing perspectives, we seem to have embarked on an era of methodological reflections - rather than developing strong theoretical foundations. This volume aims to provide an overview of these new insights and frontiers for theoretical/methodological studies and research applications in the space-economy.

Over more than two centuries the developmentofeconomic theory has created a wide array of different concepts, theories, and insights. My recent books, Capital and Knowledge (Zhang, 1999) and A TheoryofInternational Trade (Zhang, 2000) show how separate economic theories such as the Marxian economics, the Keynesian economics, the general equilibrium theory, the neoclassical growth theory, and the neoclassical trade theory can be examined within a single theoretical framework. This book isto further expand the frameworkproposed in the previous studies. This book is a part of my economic theory with endogenous population, capital, knowledge, preferences, sexual division of labor and consumption, institutions, economic structures and exchange values over time and space (Zhang, 1996a). As an extension of the Capital and Knowledge, which is focused on the dynamics of national economies, this book is to construct a theory of urban economies. We are concerned with dynamic relations between division of labor, division ofconsumption and determination of prices structure over space. We examine dynamic interdependence between capital accumulation, knowledge creation and utilization, economicgrowth, price structuresand urban pattern formation under free competition. The theory is constructed on the basisofa few concepts within a compact framework. The comparative advantage of our theory is that in providing rich insights into complex of spatial economies it uses only a few concepts and simplified functional forms and accepts a few assumptions about behavior of consumers, producers, and institutionalstructures.

This volume is a collection of articles that shape and define a new view of the economy as an evolving complex system. This view is one of the economy as emerging from the interactions of individual agents whose behavior constantly evolves, whose strategies and actions are always adapting.

A new view of the economy as an evolving, complex system has been pioneered at the Santa Fe Institute over the last ten years, This volume is a collection of articles that shape and define this view?a view of the economy as emerging from the interactions of individual agents whose behavior constantly evolves, whose strategies and actions are always adapting.The traditional framework in economics portrays activity within an equilibrium steady state. The interacting agents in the economy are typically homogenous, solve well-defined problems using perfect rationality, and act within given legal and social structures. The complexity approach, by contrast, sees economic activity as continually changing?continually in process. The interacting agents are typically heterogeneous, they must cognitively interpret the problems they face, and together they create the structures?markets, legal and social institutions, price patters, expectations?to which they individually react. Such structures may never settle down. Agents may forever adapt and explore and evolve their behaviors within structures that continually emerge and change and disappear?structures these behaviors co-create. This complexity approach does not replace the equilibrium one?it complements it.The papers here collected originated at a recent conference at the Santa Fe Institute, which was called to follow up the well-known 1987 SFI conference organized by Philip Anderson, Kenneth Arrow, and David Pines. They survey the new study of complexity and the economy. They apply this approach to real economic problems and they show the extent to which the initial vision of the 1987 conference has come to fruition.