Read more
While dating from post-Classical economists such as Thorstein Veblen and Joseph Schumpeter, the inception of the modern field of evolutionary economics is usually dated to the early 1980s. Broadly speaking, evolutionary economics sees the economy as undergoing continual, evolutionary change. Evolutionary change indicates that these changes were not planned, but rather were the result of innovations and selection processes. These often involved winners and losers, but most importantly, they resulted in actors learning what was and was not working.
Evolutionary economics, in contrast to mainstream economics, emphasises the relevance of variables such as technology, institutions, decision rules, routines, or consumer preferences for explaining the complex evolutionary changes in the economy. In so doing, evolutionary economics significantly broadens the scope of economic analysis, and sheds new light on key concepts and issues of the discipline.
This handbook draws on a stellar cast list of international contributors, ranging from the founders of the field to the newest voices. The volume explores the current state of the art in the field of evolutionary economics at the levels of the micro (e.g. firms and households), meso (e.g. industries and institutions), and macro (e.g. economic policy, structure, and growth).
Overall, the Routledge Handbook of Evolutionary Economics provides an excellent overview of current trends and issues in this rapidly developing field.
List of contents
Introduction: Evolutionary economics: A navigational guide PART I Foundational issues and theoretical domains 1 Joseph A. Schumpeter: One of the founders of evolutionary economics 2 Thorstein Bunde Veblen: A founder of evolutionary economics 3 The foundational evolutionary traverse of Richard R. Nelson and Sidney G. Winter 4 F. A. Hayek and evolutionary Austrian economics 5 Kenneth Boulding's contribution to evolutionary economics 6 Evolutionary economics and psychology: Where we are, where we could go 7 Evolutionary cultural science 8 Evolutionary economics and economic history 9 Why an evolutionary economic geography? The spatial economy as a complex evolving system 10 Darwin's ideas and their mixed reception in evolutionary economics 11 Computational evolutionary economics: Minimal principle and minimum intelligence 12 Evolutionary modelling and the rule-based approach 13 Contingency in evolutionary economics: Causality and comparative analysis Marco Lehmann-Waffenschmidt 14 The firm as an experimental decision maker 15 Evolutionary economics, routines, and dynamic capabilities 16 Routines 17 Organizational routines 18 Memes 19 The path dependence of knowledge and innovation 20 Evolutionary consumer theory 21 Evolutionary price theory 22 The coevolution of innovation and demand PART II Evolutionary economic policy and political economy 23 Evolutionary economic policy and competitiveness 24 Smart specialisation 25 Evolutionary economic geography and policy 26 Global knowledge embeddedness 27 Macro-evolutionary modelling of climate policies 28 The visible hand of innovation policy 29 Generalized rules, Nelson-Winter routines, and Ostrom rules 30 Democracy as an evolutionary process 31 Public entrepreneurship in economic evolution 32 Evolutionary political economy 33 Division of labor as co-evolutionary process of ecology, technology, culture, organization, and knowledge 34 Evolutionary economics and LDCs: An African perspective 35 Globalization and its governance in an evolutionary perspective
About the author
Kurt Dopfer is Professor Emeritus at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland.
Richard R. Nelson is Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, New York, USA.
Jason Potts is Professor at RMIT, Melbourne, Australia.
Andreas Pyka is Professor at University Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany.
Summary
This handbook provides an overview of current trends and issues in the rapidly developing field of evolutionary economics, an approach which emphasises the levels of the micro (e.g. firms and households), meso (e.g. industries and institutions), and macro (e.g. economic policy, structure and growth).
Report
"I wish that this book had been available to me while I was in graduate school. This handbook has immediately become my 'go-to' recommendation for undergraduate and graduate students seeking the knowledge of evolutionary economics and an organised entry point into the vast literature across many disciplines it comprises and has inspired. It has also become an instant indispensable reference in my own research. No better editors could have been proposed for such a volume, and they have delivered, what is presented here is nothing less than a comprehensive, organised survey of the entire body of thought put forward by those who see the economy as a complex evolving system."
Dr Brendan Markey-Towler, University of Queensland, Australia
