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 them 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. This book covers the basic principles and methods, and offers an overview of the various domains―ranging from diverse fields of productivity studies, agricultural economics, to 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.

Ping Chen is Professor of Finance at the National School of Development, Peking University, Beijing, and a Research Fellow at the China Institute, Fudan University, Shanghai, China. Ping holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Texas at Austin, USA. Their research includes economic color chaos, birth–death process for financial markets, theory of metabolic growth and unified theory of complexity economics.

Wolfram Elsner is Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Bremen, Germany, since 1995. He managed the Editor Forum for Social Economics from 2012 to 2018. Wolfram was President of the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (EAEPE) in 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.