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Non-Equilibrium Social Science and Policy : Introduction and Essays on New and Changing Paradigms in Socio-Economic Thinking
The overall aim of this book, an outcome of the European FP7 FET Open NESS project, is to contribute to the ongoing effort to put the quantitative social sciences on a proper footing for the 21st century. A key focus is economics, and its implications on policy making, where the still dominant traditional approach increasingly struggles to capture the economic realities we observe in the world today - with vested interests getting too often in the way of real advances.Insights into behavioral economics and modern computing techniques have made possible both the integration of larger information sets and the exploration of disequilibrium behavior
Money and debt : The public role of banks
This book from the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy explains how money creation and banking works, describes the main problems of the current monetary and financial system and discusses several reform options. This book systematically evaluates proposals for fundamental monetary reform, including ideas to separate money and credit by breaking up banks, introducing a central bank digital currency, and introducing public payment banks. By drawing on these plans, the authors suggest several concrete reforms to the current banking system with the aim to ensure that the monetary system remains stable, contributes to the Dutch economy, fairly distributes benefits, costs and risks, and enjoys public legitimacy. This systematic approach, and the accessible way in which the book is written, allows specialized and non-specialised readers to understand the intricacies of money, banking, monetary reform and financial innovation, far beyond the Dutch context.
Intangible capital and growth : Essays on labor productivity, monetary economics, and political economy ; Vol.1
It is now widely recognized that intangible capital has been a crucial element in the growth performance of these economies and their firms. In the author's view, “intangible capital” serves as the most appropriate umbrella term for capturing several dimensions of capital that are not tangible in nature but are nevertheless fundamentally important for growth. The term encompasses investments in education (human capital) and in informal (social capital) and formal (rule of law) institutions by the public sector and households, as well as investments by businesses aimed at enhancing their knowledge base, such as software, innovative property, and economic competencies.
Innovation Policy in a Knowledge-Based Economy : Theory and Practice
Why Analyze Innovation Policies From a Knowledge- Based Perspective? It is broadly accepted that we have moved (or are moving) to a knowled- based economy, characterized at least by two main features: that knowl edge is a major factor in economic growth, and innovation processes are systemic by nature. It is not surprising that this change in the economic paradigm requires new analytical foundations for innovation policies. One of the purposes of this book is to make suggestions as to what they should include. Underpinning all the chapters in this book is a conviction of the impor tance of dynamic and systemic approaches to innovation policy. Nelson and Arrow saw innovation and the creation of new knowl edge as the emergence and the diffusion of new information, characterized essentially as a public good. The more recent theoretical literature regarded the rationale for innovation policies as being to provide solutions to "mar ket failures". Today, however, knowledge is seen as multidimensional (tacit vs. codified) and open to interpretation. Acknowledging that the creation, coordination and diffusion of knowledge are dynamic and cumu lative processes, and that innovation processes result from the coordination of distributed knowledge, renders the "market failure" view of innovation policies obsolete. Innovation policies must be systemic and dynamic
Evolving Connectionist Systems : The Knowledge Engineering Approach
Evolving Connectionist Systems is aimed at all those interested in developing and using intelligent computational models and systems to solve challenging real world problems in computer science, engineering, bioinformatics and neuroinformatics. The book challenges scientists and practitioners with open questions about future creation of new information models inspired by Nature. This edition includes new methods for adaptive, knowledge-based learning, such as online incremental feature selection, spiking neural networks, transductive neuro-fuzzy inference, adaptive data and model integration, cellular automata and artificial life systems, particle swarm optimisation, ensembles of evolving systems, and quantum inspired neural networks. New applications to gene and protein interaction modelling, brain data analysis and brain model creation, computational neuro-genetic modelling, adaptive speech, image and multimodal recognition, language modelling, adaptive robotics, modelling dynamic financial and socio-economic systems, and ecological modelling, are covered. An important new feature of the book is the attempt to connect different structural and functional levels of a complex, intelligent system, looking for inspiration from functional relationships in natural systems, such as the genetic and the brain activity.
Evolution from Cellular to Social Scales
Evolution is a critical challenge for many areas of science, technology and development of society. The book reviews general evolutionary facts such as origin of life and evolution of the genome and clues to evolution through simple systems. Emerging areas of science such as "systems biology" and "bio-complexity" are founded on the idea that phenomena need to be understood in the context of highly interactive processes operating at different levels and on different scales. This is where physics meets complexity in nature, and where we must begin to learn about complexity if we are to understand it. Similarly, there is an increasingly urgent need to understand and predict the evolutionary behavior of highly interacting man-made systems, in areas such as communications and transport, which permeate the modern world. The same applies to the evolution of human networks such as social, political and financial systems, where technology has tended to vastly increase both the complexity and speed of interaction, which is sometimes effectively instantaneous.
Emergent Macroeconomics : An Agent-Based Approach to Business Fluctuations
This book contributes substantively to the current state-of-the-art of macroeconomics by providing a method for building models in which business cycles and economic growth emerge from the interactions of a large number of heterogeneous agents. Drawing from recent advances in agent-based computational modeling, the authors show how insights from dispersed fields like the microeconomics of capital market imperfections, industrial dynamics and the theory of stochastic processes can be fruitfully combined to improve our understanding of macroeconomic dynamics. This book should be a valuable resource for all researchers interested in analyzing macroeconomic issues without recurring to a fictitious representative agent.
Dynamics of Japan’s Trade and Industrial Policy in the Post Rapid Growth Era (1980–2000)
This book provides an in-depth examination of Japan's policy responses to the economic challenges of the 1980s and '90s. While MITI's earlier role in promoting rapid growth has been addressed in other studies, this volume, based on official records and exhaustive interviews, is the first to examine the aftermath of rapid growth and the evolution of MITI's interpretation of the economy's changing needs.
Dumbing Down : The Crisis of Quality and Equity in a Once-Great School System—and How to Reverse the Trend
This book examines the challenges and issues caused by a move to a marketized education system in Sweden. Observing the introduction of the school voucher system and a postmodern social constructivist view of knowledge, the move away from objective knowledge is identified as the core reason for Sweden’s current education crisis. The impact of declining education standards on the labor market is also discussed.
Discrete-time Markov jump linear systems
Safety critical and high-integrity systems, such as industrial plants and economic systems, can be subject to abrupt changes - for instance, due to component or interconnection failure, sudden environment changes, etc. Combining probability and operator theory, Discrete-Time Markov Jump Linear Systems provides a unified and rigorous treatment of recent results for the control theory of discrete jump linear systems, which are used in these areas of application. The book is designed for experts in linear systems with Markov jump parameters, but is also of interest for specialists in stochastic control since it presents stochastic control problems for which an explicit solution is possible - making the book suitable for course use.
Convergence and Applications of Newton-type Iterations
Recent results in local convergence and semi-local convergence analysis constitute a natural framework for the theoretical study of iterative methods. This monograph provides a comprehensive study of both basic theory and new results in the area. Each chapter contains new theoretical results and important applications in engineering, modeling dynamic economic systems, input-output systems, optimization problems, and nonlinear and linear differential equations. Several classes of operators are considered, including operators without Lipschitz continuous derivatives, operators with high order derivatives, and analytic operators. Each section is self-contained. Examples are used to illustrate the theory and exercises are included at the end of each chapter.
Learning in Economic Systems with Expectations Feedback
Recently economists have more and more focussed on scenarios in which agents' views of the world may be erroneous. These notes introduce the concept of perfect forecasting rules which provide best least-squares predictions along the evolution of an economic system.
Carbon and Its Domestication
Carbon is chemically versatile and is thus the body and soul of biological, geological, ecological and economic systems. Its appropriation by humans through diversion of its biogeochemical cycle has been a mainstay of development. This domestication is characterized by a number of thresholds: control of fire, development of agriculture, expansion of Europe, fossil-fuel use and biotechnology. All have exacted an environmental toll, not least being climatic change and biodiversity loss. Carbon management now and in the future is a ‘hot’ political issue.
Atlas of global change risk of population and economic systems
Iillustrates the spatial distribution of the global change risk of population and economic systems with the maps of environment, global climate change, global population and economic systems, and global change risk. The risks of global change are mapped at 0.25 degree grid unit. The risk results and their contribution rates of the world at national level are unprecedentedly derived and ranked. The book can be a good reference for researchers and students in the field of global climate change and natural disaster risk management, as well as risk managers and enterpriser to understand the global change risk of population and economic systems.
