The economic crisis happening across the world over the last few years describes a range of interdependencies and interactions,and has highlighted the fundamentalf laws of neoclassical economic theory: its unedifying focus on prediction and, above all, its inability to explain how the economy really works. As such, it is increasingly recognised that economic phenomena cannot be exclusively investigated as being derived from deterministic, predictable and mechanistic dynamics. Instead, a new approach is required by which history-dependence, organic and ever-evolving processes are (...) also accounted for. As this view implies new challenges and opportunities for policy, we will focus our attention on innovative components of Complexity Theory for the study of economics and the evaluation of public policies. (shrink)

The New Economic Windows Series, derived from Massimo Salzano's ideas and work, incorporates material from textbooks, monographs and conference proceedings that deals with both the theoretical and applied aspects of various sub-disciplines ...

Starting for the good results reached in physics researchers in economics and finance have been interested in testing nonlinear dependence and chaos in economic models and data. A wide variety of reasons for this interest have been suggested, including an attempt to improve the forecasting accuracy of linear time series models and to better explain the dynamics of the underlying variables of interest using a richer class of models than that permitted by limiting the set to the linear case. But (...) chaos theory has not had the same impact in the economics as it has in the hard sciences like physics. The literature did not provide a solid support for chaos as a consequence of the high noise level that exists in most economic time series, the relatively small sample sizes of data, and the weak robustness of chaos tests for these data. (shrink)