1st Edition
Routledge Handbook of Evolutionary Economics
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.
Evolutionary economics: A navigational guide
Kurt Dopfer, Richard R. Nelson, Jason Potts, and Andreas Pyka
PART I Foundational issues and theoretical domains
1 Joseph A. Schumpeter: One of the founders of evolutionary economics
Heinz D. Kurz
2 Thorstein Bunde Veblen: A founder of evolutionary economics
Helge Peukert
3 The foundational evolutionary traverse of Richard R. Nelson and Sidney G. Winter
Isabel Almudi and Francisco Fatas-Villafranca
4 F. A. Hayek and evolutionary Austrian economics
Viktor J. Vanberg
5 Kenneth Boulding’s contribution to evolutionary economics
Stefan Kesting
6 Evolutionary economics and psychology: Where we are, where we could go
Brendan Markey-Towler
7 Evolutionary cultural science
Carsten Hermann-Pillath
8 Evolutionary economics and economic history
Andreas Resch
9 Why an evolutionary economic geography? The spatial economy as a complex evolving system
Ron L. Martin and Peter J. Sunley
10 Darwin’s ideas and their mixed reception in evolutionary economics
Gabriel Yoguel and Verónica Robert
11 Computational evolutionary economics: Minimal principle and minimum intelligence
Shu-Heng Chen
Evolutionary modelling and the rule-based approach
Thomas Grebel
Contingency in evolutionary economics: Causality and comparative analysis Marco Lehmann-Waffenschmidt
Thomas Grebel
14 The firm as an experimental decision maker
Gunnar Eliasson
15 Evolutionary economics, routines, and dynamic capabilities
David J. Teece
16 Routines
Markus C. Becker
17 Organizational routines
Nathalie Lazaric
18 Memes
Michael P. Schlaile, Walter Veit, and Maarten Boudry
19 The path dependence of knowledge and innovation
Cristiano Antonelli and Pier Paolo Patrucco
Evolutionary Consumer Theory
Andreas Chai and Zakaria Babutsidze
21 Evolutionary price theory
Harry Bloch
22 The coevolution of innovation and demand
Pier Paolo Saviotti
PART II Evolutionary economic policy and political economy
23 Evolutionary economic policy and competitiveness
Michael Peneder
24 Smart specialisation
Dominique Foray
25 Evolutionary economic geography and policy
Ron Boschma
Global knowledge embeddedness
Holger Graf and Martin Kalthaus
Macro-evolutionary modelling of climate policies
Karolina Safarzynska
28 The visible hand of innovation policy
Uwe Cantner and Claudia Werker
29 Generalized rules, Nelson-Winter routines, and Ostrom rules
Georg D. Blind
30 Democracy as an evolutionary process
Isabel Almudi and Francisco Fatas-Villafranca
31 Public entrepreneurship in economic evolution
Jan Schnellenbach
32 Evolutionary political economy
Manuel Scholz-Wäckerle
33 Division of labor as co-evolutionary process of ecology, technology, culture, organization, and knowledge
Ping Chen
34 Evolutionary economics and LDCs: An African perspective
J. Fagerberg, E. Kraemer-Mbula, and E. Lorenz
35 Globalization and its governance in an evolutionary perspective
Pascal Petit
Biography
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.
