Policy and State in Complexity Economics

Preprint

Complexity economics has developed into a powerful empirical, theoretical, and computational research program in the last three decades, advancing more realistic economics. It converges with long-standing heterodox schools, and its theoretical and empirical findings are consistent with older heterodox research interests and predictions. Economic complexity is characterized by path-dependence, idiosyncrasies, some self-organization capacity, structural emergence, and certain statistical distributions in economic topologies and motions, as complex economic systems move between building order and phases of sudden disorder. In agent-based systems, underlying “intentionality” of agents includes improving their performance, reducing perceived complexity, and generating social institutions. Boosted by the financial crisis 2008ff., a surge to explore complexity-economics’ policy implications has emerged. This chapter will briefly review the literature on economic Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) and derive implications for economic-policy interventions and the state to act upon socio-economic complexity. From an “evolution-of-cooperation” perspective, we exemplarily derive some more specific policy orientations, specified “framework-policy” or “interactive-policy” approaches, embedded in a conception that we call “new meritorics”. We consider some required structures and capacities that a modern effective state, capable of a strong and persistent, but learning and adapting “complexity policy”, should have.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft
• Subject: Complex adaptive systems (CAS) ; complexity ; economic policy ; emergence ; evolution ; institutions ; networks ; self-organization ; group size ; state structure ; qualification

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Elsner, Wolfram
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Routledge
• (where): London and New York
• (when): 2017

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/158766
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET