In this book, leading experts discuss innovative components of complexity theory and chaos theory in economics. The underlying perspective is that investigations of economic phenomena should view these phenomena not as deterministic, predictable and mechanistic but rather as process dependent, organic and always evolving. The aim is to highlight the exciting potential of this approach in economics and its ability to overcome the limitations of past research and offer important new insights. The book offers a stimulating mix of theory, examples and policy. By casting light on a variety of topics in the field, it will provide an ideal platform for researchers wishing to deepen their understanding and identify areas for further investigation.

Presents a comprehensive overview of applications of complexity theory in economics from some of the leading figures in the field. This title includes chapters that cover such topic areas as conceptual issues, microeconomic market dynamics, aggregation and macroeconomics issues, and, evolutionary and ecological-environmental economics. This book provides a comprehensive and current overview of applications of complexity theory in economics from leading figures in the field. The fifteen chapters cover such broad topic areas as conceptual issues, microeconomic market dynamics, aggregation and macroeconomics issues, econophysics and financial markets, international economic dynamics, evolutionary and ecological-environmental economics, and, broader ideological and historical perspectives on economic complexity.

Maps capture data expressing the economic complexity of countries from Albania to Zimbabwe, offering current economic measures and as well as a guide to achieving prosperity Why do some countries grow and others do not? The authors of The Atlas of Economic Complexity offer readers an explanation based on "Economic Complexity," a measure of a society's productive knowledge. Prosperous societies are those that have the knowledge to make a larger variety of more complex products. The Atlas of Economic Complexity attempts to measure the amount of productive knowledge countries hold and how they can move to accumulate more of it by making more complex products. Through the graphical representation of the "Product Space," the authors are able to identify each country's "adjacent possible," or potential new products, making it easier to find paths to economic diversification and growth. In addition, they argue that a country's economic complexity and its position in the product space are better predictors of economic growth than many other well-known development indicators, including measures of competitiveness, governance, finance, and schooling. Using innovative visualizations, the book locates each country in the product space, provides complexity and growth potential rankings for 128 countries, and offers individual country pages with detailed information about a country's current capabilities and its diversification options. The maps and visualizations included in the Atlas can be used to find more viable paths to greater productive knowledge and prosperity.

A collection of previous published papers by the author on the subject of complexity economics, appearing from the 1980s to the present.

This book is the very first book-length study devoted to the advances in technological development and systems research in cooperative economics. The chapters provide, first of all, a coherent framework for understanding and applying the concepts and approaches of complexity and systems science for the advanced study of cooperative networks and particular cooperative enterprises and communities. Second, the book serves as a unique source of reliable information on the frontier information technologies available for the production, consumer, credit, and agricultural cooperative enterprises, discussing predominant strategies, potential drivers of change, and responses to complex problems. Given the diverse range of backgrounds and advanced research results, researchers, decision-makers, and stakeholders from all fields of cooperative economics in any country of the world will undoubtedly benefit from this book.

This comprehensive and innovative Handbook applies the tools of the economics of complexity to analyse the causes and effects of technological and structural change. It grafts the intuitions of the economics of complexity into the tradition of analysis based upon the Schumpeterian and Marshallian legacies. The Handbook elaborates the notion of innovation as an emerging property of the organized complexity of an economic system, and provides the basic tools to understand the recursive dynamics between the emergence of innovation and the unfolding of organized complexity. In so doing, it highlights the role of organizational thinking in explaining the introduction of innovations and the dynamics of structural change. With a new methodological approach to the economics of technological change, this wide-ranging volume will become the standard reference for postgraduates, academics and practitioners in the fields of evolutionary economics, complexity economics and the economics of innovation.

“If you liked Chaos, you’ll love Complexity. Waldrop creates the most exciting intellectual adventure story of the year” (The Washington Post). In a rarified world of scientific research, a revolution has been brewing. Its activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in physics and economics and pony-tailed graduates, mathematicians, and computer scientists from all over the world. They have formed an iconoclastic think-tank and their radical idea is to create a new science: complexity. They want to know how a primordial soup of simple molecules managed to turn itself into the first living cell—and what the origin of life some four billion years ago can tell us about the process of technological innovation today. This book is their story—the story of how they have tried to forge what they like to call the science of the twenty-first century. “Lucidly shows physicists, biologists, computer scientists and economists swapping metaphors and reveling in the sense that epochal discoveries are just around the corner . . . [Waldrop] has a special talent for relaying the exhilaration of moments of intellectual insight.” —The New York Times Book Review “Where I enjoyed the book was when it dove into the actual question of complexity, talking about complex systems in economics, biology, genetics, computer modeling, and so on. Snippets of rare beauty here and there almost took your breath away.” —Medium “[Waldrop] provides a good grounding of what may indeed be the first flowering of a new science.” —Publishers Weekly