Handbook of regional growth and development theories

摘要

The first line of the editors' introduction to this impressive collection declares that "Regional economics is back on the stage". While credit is given to the new economic geography (NEG) spawned by mainstream economics over the past twenty years, the contributions mainly review and promote the longer established work carried out in analytical regional science. In twenty-five chapters, by an authoritative array of more than forty American, European, and Antipodean authors, current problems of regional analysis and the challenges they raise for future research are addressed. Significantly, especially for anyone approaching regional development from other disciplinary perspectives, Roberta Capello and Peter Nijkamp argue that the most important challenge is to achieve genuine interdisciplinarity between regional economics and mainstream economics. This requires combining "the economic laws and mechanisms that explain growth with territorial factors springing from the intrinsic relationality present at [the] local level": in other words, demonstrating the "micro-foundations of maeroeconomic growth models" (page 8).