1st Edition
Routledge International Handbook of Complexity Economics
The Routledge International Handbook of Complexity Economics covers the historical developments and early concerns of complexity theorists and brings it into engagement with the world today.
In this volume, a distinguished group of international scholars explore the state of the art of complexity economics, and how it may deliver new and relevant insights to the challenges of the 21st century. Complexity science started in 1899 when Henri Poincaré described the three-body problem. The first approaches in economics emerged somewhat later, in the 1980s, driven by the Brussels-Austin school. Since then, complexity economics has gone through numerous developments: departing from linear simplifications, applying physical algorithms, to evolutionary economics and big data. The book covers the basic principles and methods, offers an overview of the various domains — ranging from diverse fields of productivity studies, agricultural economics, and monetary economics — as well as the current challenges such as climate change, epidemics, and economic inequality where complexity economics can provide insight. It closes with a review of complexity political economy and policy.
Offering a vibrant alternative to orthodox economics, this handbook is a crucial resource for advanced students, researchers and economists across the disciplines of heterodox economics, economic theory, and econophysics.
Table of Contents
More about the editors
List of contributors
Ping Chen, Wolfram Elsner, Andreas Pyka: The Complexity of Complexity Economics – Historical Emergence, Interdisciplinarity, Contesting Perspectives, and Future Development. Introduction to the Handbook of Complexity Economics
Part I: Basics and Methods in Complexity Economics
I.1: Basics
Chapter 1: Mauro Gallegati, Alan Kirman: Stairway to Complexity
Chapter 2: K. Vela Velupillai: Aspects of Discrete and Continuous Complexity Theories
Chapter 3: César A. Hidalgo: Knowledge is Non-Fungible
Chapter 4: John B. Davis: What are Reflexive Economic Agents? Position-Adjustment, SLAM, and Self-Organization
Chapter 5: Pier Paolo Saviotti: Complexity, Coevolution, and the Economy
Chapter 6: Ping Chen: Complexity Economics: History, Issues, and Methods
I.2: Methods Chapter 7: W. Brian W. Arthur: Some Thoughts on Agent-Based Modeling and the Role of Computation in Economics Chapter 8: James K. Galbraith: Economic Complexity in the Real World
Chapter 9: Linyuan Lü, Shuqi Xu, Xu Na: Complexity Science in the Application of Big Data Economics
Chapter 10: Kristina Bogner, Matthias Müller, Johannes Dahlke, Bernd Ebersberger, Thomas Berger: Agent-Based Modelling and Machine Learning - A New Paradigm for Complexity Economics and Sustainability Transitions?
Chapter 11: Roy Cerqueti, Matteo Cinelli, Giovanna Ferraro, Antonio Iovanella: The Resilience of a Complex Network: Methods and Applications
Chapter 12: Karl Naumann-Woleske, Max Sina Knicker, Michael Benzaquen, Jean-Philippe Bouchaud: Exploration of the Parameter Space in Macroeconomic Models
Chapter 13: Gaël Giraud, Paul Valcke: Stock-Flow-Consistent Macroeconomic Dynamics in Continuous Time
Part II: Domains and Major Challenges
II.1: Domains
Chapter 14.1: Victor M. Yakovenko: Monetary Economics from econophysics perspective (reprint)
Chapter 14.2: Victor M. Yakovenko: Statistical Physics Perspective on Economic Inequality
Chapter 15: Harry Bloch, Stan Metcalfe: Price Theory in a Complex and Evolving Economy
Chapter 16: Roger A. McCain: Complexity and Productivity: The Task Approach
Chapter 17: Ping Chen: From Economic Chaos to Viable Markets: The Biophysics Foundation of Smith’s Theory on the Division of Labor and Schumpeter’s Wave Theory of Business Cycles
Chapter 18: Petra Ahrweiler: The Evolution of Innovation
Chapter 19: Thomas Berger: Agriculture as a Social-Ecological System
Chapter 20: Leilei Shi, Bing-Hong Wang: Network Complexity and Financial Behavior – Volume Distribution over Price in Financial Market
Chapter 21: Yinan N. Tang: Trading Psychology and Market Resilience: From Brownian Motion to Birth-Death Process in Financial Dynamics
Chapter 22: Hardy Hanappi: Complex World Money
Chapter 23: Éva Kuruczleki, Anita Pelle, Marcell Zoltán Végh: The European Union as a Complex System in Times of Crisis
II.2: New Challenges
Chapter 24: Dirk Helbing, Carina I. Hausladen: Socio-Economic Implications of the Digital Revolution
Chapter 25: Marcello Nieddu, Marco Raberto, Silvano Cincotti: Agent-Based Macroeconomics of Climate and Digital Transformations
Chapter 26: Matteo Coronese, Davide Luzzati: Economic Impacts of Natural Hazards and Complexity Science: A Critical Review
Chapter 27: Michael W. M. Roos: Climate Change From the Perspective of Complexity Economics
Chapter 28: Torsten Heinrich: Epidemics in Modern Economies
Chapter 29: Jing Chen, James K. Galbraith: A Biophysical Approach to Production Theory
Chapter 30: Sheri M. Markose: Digital Foundations of Evolvable Genomic Intelligence and Human Proteanism: Complexity with Novelty Production beyond Bounded Rationality
Chapter 31: Dominik Hartmann, Flávio L. Pinheiro: Economic Complexity and Inequality at the National and Regional Level
PART III: Political Economy and Complexity Policy
III.1: Complexity Political Economy
Chapter 32: Hilton Root: An Agenda for Complex Systems Research in Political Economy
Chapter 33: Manuel Scholz-Wäckerle: Planetary-Scale Computation, Political Economic Complexity and Hegemony
Chapter 34: Frank Beckenbach: Potential for Mutual Enrichment? – Confronting Marxian Economics and Complexity Economics
III.2: Complexity Policy
Chapter 35: Fernanda Senra de Moura, Pete Barbrook-Johnson: Using Data-Driven Systems Mapping to Contextualise Complexity Economics Insights
Chapter 36: Carlo Bottai, Martina Iori: The Knowledge Complexity of the European Metropolitan Areas: Selecting and Clustering Their Hidden Features
Chapter 37: Giovanni Dosi, Marcelo C. Pereira, Andrea Roventini, Maria Enrica Virgillito: A Complexity View on the Future of Work. Meta-Modelling Exploration of the Multi-Sector K+ S Agent-Based Model
Biography
Ping Chen is Professor of Finance at National School of Development, Peking University, Beijing, Research Fellow at China Institute, Fudan University, Shanghai, China. Holds a Ph.D. in physics from University of Texas at Austin, USA. Research includes economic color chaos, birth-death process for financial, theory of metabolic growth, and unified theory of complexity economics.
Wolfram Elsner is Emeritus Professor of Economics at University of Bremen, Germany, since 1995. He managed the Editor Forum for Social Economics from 2012-2018. President of European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (EAEPE), 2012-2016 and editor-in-Chief of the Review of Evolutionary Political Economy (REPE) since 2018.
Andreas Pyka holds the chair for innovation economics at the University of Hohenheim. Currently, his research areas are knowledge driven developments and transformation of economic systems with a particular emphasis on the knowledge-based bioeconomy and the transformation of economic systems towards sustainability.
The complexity economics, based on physical algorithms and statistics to analyze economic mass data and time-series, provides an alternative paradigm to the overly-simplified mainstream rationality assumption-based Neoclassical approach for understanding macro growth, structural transformation, climate change, financial crises, trade wars and other real-world phenomena. This Handbook collects recent progresses and new insights by authors in this new discipline. I recommend the book to scholars who are interested in this new approach.
Justin Yifu Lin
Professor and Dean, Institute of New Structural Economics, Peking University, China
Former Chief Economist, the World BankThe economic system is a supremely complex one. The traditional approach to understanding it has been to reduce complexities to simple rules and behaviors, abstracting many features of the real economy. However, thanks to the enormous increases in both the amount of data available and computing power, there is nowadays an alternative approach: the one proposed by complexity economics, a fast-growing field in economic analysis.
The Handbook of Complexity Economics provides a thorough and updated vision of this very promising field and will surely encourage many scholars to deepen research in this area.
Victor A. Beker
Professor of Economics, University of Belgrano and University of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Former Associate Editor of Journal of Behavior and OrganizationTimely and compact one-volume from a set of economists uniquely positioned to contribute about complexity. The result is an up-to-date, integrated, compelling, canonical guide-book on the contours and contents of an approach that is extremely remunerative for theory as well as actual practice in the 21st century economy. Older and younger generations now have a fresh meeting point from where to breathe new life into the most pressing intellectual and societal challenges of our age.
Sandro Mendonça
Iscte Business School, Portugal
Former communications regulator
