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“It should also be noted that the objective of convergence and equal distribution, including across under-performing areas, can hinder efforts to generate growth. Contrariwise, the objective of competitiveness can exacerbate regional and social inequalities, by targeting efforts on zones of excellence where projects achieve greater returns (dynamic major cities, higher levels of general education, the most advanced projects, infrastructures with the heaviest traffic, and so on). If cohesion policy and the Lisbon Strategy come into conflict, it must be borne in mind that the former, for the moment, is founded on a rather more solid legal foundation than the latter” European Commission (2005, p. 9)Adaptation of Cohesion Policy to the Enlarged Europe and the Lisbon and Gothenburg Objectives.

In class action antitrust litigation, the standards for acceptable economic analysis at class certification have continued to evolve. The most recent event in this evolution is the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Comcast Corp. v. Behrend, 133 S. Ct. 1435 (2013). The evolution of pre-Comcast law on this topic is presented, the Comcast decision is thoroughly assessed, as are the standards for developing reliable economic analysis. This article explains how economic evidence of both antitrust liability and damages ought to be developed in light of the teachings of Comcast, and how liability evidence can be used by economists to support a finding of common impact for certification purposes. In addition, the article addresses how statistical techniques such as averaging, price-dispersion analysis, and multiple regressions have and should be employed to establish common proof of damages.

Certain elements of Hayek’s work are prominent precursors to the modern field of complex adaptive systems, including his ideas on spontaneous order, his focus on market processes, his contrast between designing and gardening, and his own framing of complex systems. Conceptually, he was well ahead of his time, prescient in his formulation of novel ways to think about economies and societies. Technically, the fact that he did not mathematically formalize most of the notions he developed makes his insights hard to incorporate unambiguously into models. However, because so much of his work is divorced from the simplistic models proffered by early mathematical economics, it stands as fertile ground for complex systems researchers today. I suggest that Austrian economists can create a progressive research program by building models of these Hayekian ideas, and thereby gain traction within the economics profession. Instead of mathematical models the suite of techniques and tools known as agent-based computing seems particularly well-suited to addressing traditional Austrian topics like money, business cycles, coordination, market processes, and so on, while staying faithful to the methodological individualism and bottom-up perspective that underpin the entire school of thought.

Airports and urban developments in their vicinity constitute a highly specialized type of agglomeration based on air connectivity that epitomizes the importance of mobility in the modern service economy. However, in a frictionless world of backyard capitalism and perfect competition, such agglomeration of civil aviation services would not have been necessary. Thus, concepts such as imperfect markets, path dependence, and cumulative causation may be alternatively used to explain the spatial aspects of airport developments. Focusing on “second-nature” concentration, the “new geographical economics” (NGE) literature offers a potential theoretical framework that organizes these concepts into a coherent economic framework. This chapter aims to highlight the unique relevance of the NGE approach in developing an economics-based understanding of the spatial distribution of airports. Drawing from the existing NGE knowledge-base, this conceptual chapter explains that the NGE approach can be adopted as a micro-foundation to show how the spatial aspects of airport development, including core-periphery dynamics of regional disparity and parity, can emerge from economic mechanisms. The chapter concludes with potential implications for airport economics and regional policy, along with the discussion of some of the main critiques of the theory.

Norway is a small nation state on the northernmost coastline of Western Europe, integrated in the Western world economy. For centuries Norway's integration in the world economy had been based on exports of raw materials such as fish and timber, as well as shipping services. In the early 20th century, furnace-based metals (made possible by cheap hydropower) were added to this export basket. Just as the world economy entered an increasingly unstable phase in 1970s, another natural resource was discovered in Norway: petroleum – that is, oil and natural gas from the North Sea. This chapter analyses the challenges and possibilities inherent in the Norwegian strategy of developing an oil economy in a world economic situation influenced by new and stronger forms of international integration through the four decades between 1970 and 2010.

This chapter reassesses the economics of interest rate risk management in light of the global financial crisis by developing a derivative-based integrated treatment of interest rate and credit risk interrelation. The decade-long historical data on credit default swap spreads and interest rate swap rates are used as proxy measures for credit risk and interest rate risk, respectively. An elasticity of interest rate risk and credit risk, considered a function of the business cycle phases, maturity of instruments, economic sector, creditworthiness, and other macroeconomic parameters, is investigated for optimizing economic capital. This chapter sheds light on how financial institutions may address hedge strategies against downside risks implementing the proposed derivative-based integrated treatment of interest rate and credit risk assessment allowing for optimization of interest rate swap contracts. The developed framework of integrated interest rate and credit risk management is of special importance for emerging markets heavily dependent on foreign capital as it potentially allows emerging market banks to improve risk management practices in terms of capital adequacy and Basel III rules. Analyzing diversification versus compounding effects, it allows enhancing financial stability through jointly optimizing Pillar 1 and Pillar 2 economic capital.

The increasing interest in economic, social, and ecological sustainability has important implications for the traditional views on organization effectiveness, organization design, and organization development. Managers need to design organizations to achieve a “triple bottom line.” A review of the organization effectiveness literature suggests that no single model seems to provide the necessary guidance, and there is a clear need for creation, revision, and integration. Organization effectiveness criteria in the future require a clearer modeling of the multistakeholder demands so that organization designers can specify appropriate strategies, structures, systems, and processes as well as the changes necessary to develop them. We propose an integration called “responsible progress” and suggest that it represents an important new stream of organization development theory. The relationships between this new criterion of organization effectiveness and the design features necessary to pursue them must be tested.

The purpose of this chapter is to develop a new perspective model of well-balanced information economy.

The methodological tools of this work are based on application of the method of comparative analysis for comparing the old and the new model of information economy, modeling of socio-economic systems, simplex-method as an algorithm for solving the optimization task of linear programming, related to improvement of the conceptual model of information economy, and the method of formalization for graphical presentation of a new model of information economy.

The developed and presented author’s perspective model of information economy envisages balancing in four main directions: infrastructural possibilities and readiness for their practical usage by society and business; state regulation and market self-management; existing and new information; and external information exchange. Despite the clarity and strictness of conceptual settings, the new model is peculiar for increased flexibility and adaptation to the peculiarities of the socio-economic practice of economic system. Thus, the new model of well-balanced information economy allows overcoming all drawbacks – logical mismatches and contradictions – of the existing (old) model of information economy.

Due to optimization of the conceptual model, its practical implementation in economic activities of modern socio-economic systems becomes possible – as a result of which, with accumulation of experience, it will be possible to assess true value of the idea of information economy’s formation for humanity and the global economic system.