The Handbook of Regional Science is a multi-volume reference work providing a state-of-the-art knowledge on regional science composed by renowned scientists in the field. The Handbook is intended to serve the academic needs of graduate students, and junior and senior scientists in regional science and related fields, with an interest in studying local and regional socio-economic issues. The multi-volume handbook seeks to cover the field of regional science comprehensively, including areas such as regional housing and labor markets, regional economic growth, innovation and regional economic development, new and evolutionary economic geography, location and interaction, the environment and natural resources, spatial analysis and geo-computation as well as spatial statistics and econometrics.

The new Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics: Cities and Geography reviews, synthesizes and extends the key developments in urban and regional economics and their strong connection to other recent developments in modern economics. Of particular interest is the development of the new economic geography and its incorporation along with innovations in industrial organization, endogenous growth, network theory and applied econometrics into urban and regional economics. The chapters cover theoretical developments concerning the forces of agglomeration, the nature of neighborhoods and human capital externalities, the foundations of systems of cities, the development of local political institutions, regional agglomerations and regional growth. Such massive progress in understanding the theory behind urban and regional phenomenon is consistent with on-going progress in the field since the late 1960’s. What is unprecedented are the developments on the empirical side: the development of a wide body of knowledge concerning the nature of urban externalities, city size distributions, urban sprawl, urban and regional trade, and regional convergence, as well as a body of knowledge on specific regions of the world—Europe, Asia and North America, both current and historical. The Handbook is a key reference piece for anyone wishing to understand the developments in the field.

This new international Handbook provides the reader with the most up-to-date and original viewpoints on critical debates relating to the rapidly transforming geographies of regions and territories, as well as related key concepts such as place, scale, networks and regionalism. Bringing together renowned specialists who have extensively theorized these spatial concepts and contributed to rich empirical research in disciplines such as geography, sociology, political science and IR studies, this interdisciplinary collection offers fresh, cutting-edge, and contextual insights on the significance of regions and territories in today’s dynamic world.

"As a relatively new subdiscipline of economics, health economics has made many contributions to areas of the main discipline, such as insurance economics. This volume provides a survey of the burgeoning literature on the subject of health economics." {source : site de l'éditeur].

Regional economics – an established discipline for several decades – has undergone a period of rapid change in the last ten years resulting in the emergence of several new perspectives. At the same time the methodology of regional economics has also experienced some surprising developments. This fully revised and updated Handbook brings together contributions looking at new pathways in regional economics, written by many well-known international scholars. The aim is to present the most cutting-edge theories explaining regional growth and local development. The authors highlight the recent advances in theories, the normative potentialities of these theories and the cross-fertilization of ideas between regional and mainstream economists. It will be an essential source of reference and information for both scholars and students in the field.

Today, economic growth is widely understood to be conditioned by productivity increases which are, in turn, profoundly affected by innovation. This volume explores these key relationships between innovation and growth, bringing together experts from both fields to compile a unique Handbook. The Handbook considers innovation from fresh perspectives, encompassing topics such as services innovation, inward investment and innovation, creative industry innovation and green innovation. It is divided into seven sections, dealing with regional innovation and growth theory, dynamics, evolution, agglomeration, innovation 'worlds', innovation system institutions, and innovation governance and policy. This definitive compendium on regional innovation and growth will undoubtedly appeal to teachers, students, researchers and practitioners of innovation and growth dynamics worldwide.

This book summarizes the research findings in regarding a region as a rational and abstract concept and explores the principles of regional science. Focusing on location theory, spatial dynamics and regional evolution theory, it stresses that the region as a scientific concept is an essential abstract of an economic entity of a place. While it introduces a number of case studies, the content is general and universal rather than specific. Beginning with location theory – the basis of regional science – it explains how regions breed their own characteristics as economic entities against a background of place. For example, it discusses the location theory of the tourism industry and analyzes issues of facility location and R&D-industry location theory. The second part of the book addresses interactions with the spatial dynamics, including the dynamic mechanism of regions against a background of space. Spatial dynamics, which includes concepts from statistical physics, provides insights into the dynamic mechanism of aggregation, diffusion, and industrial clustering in regional science as well as in geography and economics. The book then describes regional dynamics as a development of spatial dynamics: REGION is completely independent as a research object and is no longer part of spatial dynamics. This book also discusses in detail regions as the dynamic characteristics of the economy or the basic characteristics of a certain place and examines the theory of regional evolution. It argues that regions are evolution and irreversible features of development with path dependence, which are the characteristics of a region that differ from general economic phenomena. This book by Professor Zheng Wang is outstanding. Its focus on Regional Science will open this area up to a wide variety of theoretical and applied researchers. I recommend the work without reservations. It covers critically important principles in the field and should be read and used by students, faculty and applied researchers doing policy analysis. I can see this as an important handbook and reference work as well as a textbook in the field. Kingsley Haynes