Understanding Economic Change

With increasing innovations, the economy seems to be changing rapidly at a global scale. Are there any laws governing the incessant process of economic and social transformations? What does economic theory have to say on this change, and how do institutions and our democracies cope with the challenges that come with it? This volume discusses the advances which evolutionary economics has made in exploring questions like these. Leading international experts in the field review its development, outlining across three parts how the evolutionary approach is increasingly expanding into other domains in economics. The first part of the book focuses on the political economy and welfare effects of transformation. The second part discusses how economic theory can be extended to account for the salient features of the process of change. The third and final part deals with the paradigmatic shift that an evolutionary approach implies for economics.