ERSA - European Regional Science Association

JOURNAL OF REGIONAL SCIENCE 50th ANNIVERSARY SESSION

What will be the Major Innovations in the Next 50 Years of Regional Science?

The Journal of Regional Science (JRS) will celebrate its Golden 50th anniversary in 2010. As the oldest and one of the premier journals in regional science, we thought it was appropriate to ask what will be the future of regional science over the next 50 years. Now that regional science has been recognized with the award of the 2008 Nobel Prize to Paul Krugman, what will be the next major innovations? Following the New Economic Geography, what will be the key theoretical advances? How will new empirical methodologies such as spatial econometrics and better data tools such as geographical information systems facilitate this revolution? In this quest, the JRS commissioned Gilles Duranton to assemble 25 of the world’s top regional science scholars such as Ed Glaeser, Vernon Henderson, Michael Storper, and Jacques Thisse to ask them this question. With the financial support of Wiley-Blackwell Publishers, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and the U.S. National Science Foundation, we gathered these experts at an April 2009 workshop in New York to discuss their visions of the future and contribute papers to the JRS 2010 Golden Anniversary issue.

At the 2009 ERSA Meetings, Gilles Duranton and JRS Co-editor Mark Partridge will summarize the findings at a Plenary Session, followed by a panel discussion.

The panel discussion will center broadly around two topics:

  WHERE DO WE STAND TODAY:
what has been achieved over to past 50 years concerning theoretical developments, and what have we learned from empirical research?

  WHAT IS STILL MISSING:
what would we want a new “Paul Krugman” to develop?
Are the gaps mostly theoretical or empirical?

The panel consists of experts including from theory, and empirical research; Phil McCann (University of Waikato), Steven Brakman (Groningen University, and RSAI President Roberta Capello (Politecnico di Milano). They will not only discuss the vision offered by the participants at the New York workshop, but offer their own view of the future of regional science. The session aims to be a thought-provoking and free-wheeling debate regarding the future of our discipline with the aim of both predicting and shaping the future research agenda.