Since 1990 there has been a renaissance of theoretical and empirical work on the spatial aspects of the economy - that is, where economic activity occurs and why. Using new tools - in particular, modeling techniques developed to analyze industrial organization, international trade, and economic growth - this "new economic geography" has emerged as one of the most exciting areas of contemporary economics.

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.

A crucial question in contemporary economics concerns where economic activities will locate and relocate themselves in the future. This comprehensive, innovative book applies an evolutionary framework to spatial economics, arguing against the prevailing neoclassical equilibrium model, providing important concrete and theoretical insights, and illuminating areas of future enquiry.

This open access book is the first to systematically introduce the principles of urban informatics and its application to every aspect of the city that involves its functioning, control, management, and future planning. It introduces new models and tools being developed to understand and implement these technologies that enable cities to function more efficiently – to become ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’. The smart city has quickly emerged as computers have become ever smaller to the point where they can be embedded into the very fabric of the city, as well as being central to new ways in which the population can communicate and act. When cities are wired in this way, they have the potential to become sentient and responsive, generating massive streams of ‘big’ data in real time as well as providing immense opportunities for extracting new forms of urban data through crowdsourcing. This book offers a comprehensive review of the methods that form the core of urban informatics from various kinds of urban remote sensing to new approaches to machine learning and statistical modelling. It provides a detailed technical introduction to the wide array of tools information scientists need to develop the key urban analytics that are fundamental to learning about the smart city, and it outlines ways in which these tools can be used to inform design and policy so that cities can become more efficient with a greater concern for environment and equity.

This book explores the dynamics of place, location and territories from the perspective of an experience-based economy. It offers a valuable contribution to this new approach and the planning and management challenges it faces. This book emphasises three key avenues to understanding the experience economy. First, the book reconsiders innovation processes and the relationship between the consumption and production of experience value. Second, it considers emerging forms of governance related to experience-based development in businesses and cities. Third, it examines the role of place as a value, resource and outcome of experiential innovation and planning. This book will be of interested to researchers concerned with urban and regional development.

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.