| The Economics Web
Institute offers you to freely explore classical and innovative
issues in economics and management, drawing on a large array of
theoretical reflections, real data, and interactive software models.
The Institute sweeps across a wide range of topics, from macroeconomics
to market structures, from international trade to management, because
we believe in the emergence of aggregate new properties from micro
heterogeneity and in the intertwining between individual economic
agents with macro events.
Albeit open in exploration for further concepts, the Institute
tends to use and develop mainly the evolutionary economics paradigm,
which we feel particularly suitable to 21st century, to its complexity
and hectic dynamics of economies and societies across the globe.
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Download all site compressed
[116 MB]
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News: University seminar
by our director on fair tourism
|
Selected contents
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| Essay:
Realising their rights? Self-assessed
community needs in 30 settlements in South Africa (2007) 
Based on a innovative field survey,
the needs in poor rural and urban areas have been assessed leading
to specific proposals of improvement. This methodology can be repeated
in other contexts.
Essay
|
| Essay:
Package size, price, and consumer rules
Optimal commercial offer by retailers
depends not only on efficient logistics and buyer's power with respect
to the supply chain: it hinges on the segmentation of customers
according to their rules of choice.
In this paper, an example of purchase
basket over many categories, varieties and package sizes is constructed
and commented, freely offering the Excel file with all open programming
code.
Consumers can find out their style
of shopping; managers have a device to
fix the prices in your commercial premise, the researchers
and the absolute beginners can
simply explore the unexpected consequences of the interaction of
such trivial, but real, things like package size, weight, and budget
constraints.
Essay
Software
|
| Key
concept: Repurchase
|
| Essay:
A graph representation of a basic macroeconomic
scheme: the IS-LM model
Students of the first year of
economics usually learn the basic functioning of the economy thanks
to the IS-LM model. Here we present an original representation that
concentrates the entire model in just one sheet.
The researcher will find many innovative
features to the model. To a creative economist, this representation
offers the immediate possibility of adding further variables
and outlining new or different linkages between variables.
Essay
- If you have never heard of IS-LM model, click here.
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| Essay:Proximity
in product space and diversification strategies
An empirical measurement of how difficult is to produce a new good
when your country or your firm already produces another one. Based
on a new methodology proposed in a
paper by Hidalgo, Klinger, Barabasi, and Haussman, several key
datasets are freely distributed and ten steps of intentional diversification
of national economies are outlined.
Essay
Data
Key concept:
Social groups
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| Key
concept: Remittances
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| Key
concept: Profits
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| Bilateral
trade by product
A huge cubic matrix of international
trade by exporter, importer and product. More than 1 million records
indicating trade among any two countries in the world (total and
by product). From this datase you can extract the world market for
more than 1000 product categories (standard SITC codes at 4-digits
of aggregation), exhaustive of merchandise trade. Cumulative values
for 1998, 1999 and 2000. Data in DBF format, easily readably by
free viewers and MS Access.
Data
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| Essay:
Firm-specific fixed costs and variable costs:
a model of market dynamics
What happens when firms that have
different mixes of fixed and variable costs compete on the same
market? What happens when their break-even point is different and
they compete on both price and quality?
In this easy evolutionary model
we introduce a market with a large number of firms, each characterised
by a different cost structure, and you'll be able to study the evolution
of profits over time, according to changes in demand and endogenous
technology.
Essay
Software
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| Key
concept: Degree
of difficulty
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| Software
and Essay:
Consumer theory: the neoclassical model and its opposite alternative
This free software interactively explains you the basic microeconomic
theory of consumption, while the
essay shall briefly introduce you to neoclassical tenets, suggesting
some easy experiment with the computer application.
More
importantly, it proposes you the evolutionary alternative for interpreting
real consumers' choices.
Essay
and software
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| Software:
Isoquants
A specialised software to draw isoquants according to the neoclassical
theory of production. A critical view of the usefulness of this
tool is proposed.
Software
|
| Economic
data: Exchange rates for 200 currencies, spanning across more
than 20 years
In one sheet you can track and
compare the yearly dynamics of 200 world currencies on the long
term. Currency crises, fixed exchange
rates and wide fluctuations in a fully international perspective.
Useful for any analysis of world trade.
MS Excel
|
| Essay:
Bilateral import promotion as a key to
integration in a hierarchical world
Changing the world order from
below: a challenge for rich and poor countries. This is a first
policy to raise integration relations instead of dependence and
isolation.
Essay
Economic data: Bilateral and
total trade of all countries in the world: a long time series
An amazing huge dataset with
the bilateral trade balance,
imports, and export
of 186 countries with each other (square matrices of 186 x 186),
with yearly data from 1948 to 2000 (52 matrices). Standardized consistent
values.
MS
Excel [2.5 MB]
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| Key
concept:
Foreign
direct investment
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| Key
concept:
Substitute
goods
Key concept:
Poverty
Key concept:
Advertising
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| Economic
data: Consumers' microdata: incomes,
preferences, purchase timing
Economic
data: Wage
microdata: a random sample with age, education, sex, marital status,
sector, occupation and other variables
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| Essay:
Exports and their linkages to literacy

An exploration of the manyfolds
relations of exports and the growth of the number of people capable
to write.
Essay
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| Essay:
Trade with thy neighbour
Proximity international trade
creates the kind of relative bilateral monopoly that might bring
to economic integration on equal foot, with deep reciprocation and
internalization of bilateral externalities. Marginalized sub-national
regions and communities might thrive because of the activation of
legal trade across the border.
This paper assesses the importance
of trade between neighbours for the involved regions and for the
overall structure of the world relationships.
Essay
|
| Essay:
The production function of students' grade
A critical introduction to the
neoclassical concept and use of the "production function".
To help students understanding the concept and its limitations,
the author proposes to take into consideration a particular production
process that should be well known to them: the production of grades
in an exams after an education course.
Essay
- Data spreadsheet
Key concept:
Trade balance
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| Key
concept: Gross
Domestic Product |
| Essay:
Hierarchy structures in world trade
A new technique of analysis of trade values reveals the asymmetric
structure of relationships among countries. The structure of world
trade is characterised by bilateral absence of relations
(82%) and dominance (40% in non-absent relationships), weak
dominance (of two types: 24% and 22% respectively), whereas
symmetric integration is just the 6% of non-absent relationships.
Essay
Check
the position of your country in the world system!
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| Key
concept: Exchange
rate |
| Economic
data: 2004 Labour market levels and trends in all countries of
the world: employment and unemployment
in the general population, the youth, the women
PDF
[1200 KB]
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| Key
concept:
Innovation
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| Key
concept:
Energy
Key concept:
Consumption
Key concept:
Wages
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| Essay: Consumer
decision rules for agent-based models
A clear-cut introduction to evolutionary
consumption microfoundation in agent-based models. It proposes several
rules to cope with budget constraints, product differentiation,
purchase repetition over time.
In particular, you shall find
the rules of consumer behavour used in the freely downloadable model
"Race to market", which
gave rise to these micro-data.
Moreover, it suggests to ACE
modellers a "golden rule" for more realistic models.
Essay
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| Essay: Dynamic
competition with bi-directional product differentiation, bounded
rational consumers, innovation, advertising, and finance
Useful
for managers, researchers and students, this business game is a
powerful tool for understanding product life cycles, consumers'
attitudes, innovation management
strategies, competitive intelligent tactics.
Essay
and software automatic download [2400 KB]
Essay only
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| Essay:
Who matters in a complex society?
Key people can change history, especially when the global system
is complex and under transition. A long-term view, presented in
this paper, identifies the categories of competences and individuals
interpreting and prompting structural changes.
Essay
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| Key
concept: Feedback
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| Key
concept:
Imitation
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| Economic
data: Daily time spent on different activities by employment
status, sex, and age
MS
Excel [19
KB]
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| Key
concept: Product
differentiation
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| Economic data: Long-term
macroeconomic data for 136 countries and 42 years
The most user-friendly distribution
of the main international database on GDP
components (consumption, investment,
public expenditure and net
exports) for 136 countries and 42 years. Excellent for international
comparisons, long-term growth enquiries and business cycle analysis,
since it provides real values at constant prices comparable over
time and countries.
MS Excel
MS Access
|
| Essay: Influence
of delayed feedback on learning, performance and strategy search
- revisited
Economic agents live in an uncertain
environment, where they have to learn how to behave and which is
the performance of their actions. Strategy is not given: they have
to search for the "right one", if exists at all. Feedback
is a crucial mechanism linking the past with the future, possibly
helping the agents in their tasks. In particular, the timing of
feedback signals can deeply influence their effects.
Is immediate feedback always
superior to delayed feedback? Are the features of the environment
irrelevant? This paper offer original experimental results on the
influence of delayed feedback on learning, performance and strategy
search.
Essay
|
| Book:
An Artificial Market Model of a Foreign Exchange Market - by
Kiyoshi Izumi
In this study, the author
proposes a new approach to foreign exchange (forex) market studies:
the artificial market approach - by integrating fieldwork studies
and multiagent computer models in order to explain the micro
and macro relation in markets.
Abstract
and free full-text
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| Key
concept: Tax
revenue
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| Economic data:
Tax revenue
in OECD countries (1966-2000) plus a comparison in tax systems
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| Economic data:
Tax
revenue composition (income personal and corporate tax, indirect
tax,...)
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| Economic
data: Life expectancy and healthy
life expectancy (HALE) (55 countries)
|
| Essay: Innovation
and Growth: A Schumpeterian model of innovation
The
creation of a positive feedback loop is what makes the difference
between sustained growth and gradual (or sudden) decline.
A Positive Feedback Loop Innovation
System (POLIS) is here modelled along Schumpeterian lines and applied
to the actual economy of Taiwan.
Essay
|
| Essay:
A new approach to business fluctuations:
heterogeneous interacting agents, scaling laws and financial fragility
Business fluctuations
in GDP, investment,
etc. can be explained in a new way. The authors
present a simple agent-based model, whose core is the interaction
of heterogeneous financially fragile firms and a banking sector.
In their framework, the origin of business fluctuations can be
traced back to the ever changing configuration of the network of
heterogeneous interacting firms.
Simulations of
the model replicate surprisingly well an impressive set of stylized
facts, particularly two well known universal laws.
Essay
[300 KB]
|
| Key
concept: Investment
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| Book:
High-Tech Start-Ups and Industry Dynamics
in Silicon Valley
Using two unique longitudinal
databases, Junfu
Zhang investigates firm formation, growth, mortality, and migration
in Silicon Valley during the 1990s and explain how the region evolved.
After extraordinary economic and innovation
success in the late 1990s, Silicon Valley entered a deep recession
in 2001. This study seeks to answer tough policy-relevant and empirical
questions of interest everywhere in the world.
Book
|
| Book:
How macroeconomics is changing thanks to computer - by Valentino
Piana (2000)
Macroeconomics is deeply changing
thanks to computer. It becomes easier and more realistic, while
the process of integration between macroeconomics and other economic
disciplines is given a decisive acceleration.
From econometrics to formal models,
passing through the revolution in teaching and learning techniques,
this book offers an up-to-date overview of what is happening.
Book
|
| Key
concept: Inflation |
| Key
concept: Savings
|
| Economic
data: Savings behaviors in the UK population (2000 and 2001)
PDF [860
KB]
|
| Essay: The
new conceptual limits of laisser-faire
Prof.
Sergio Bruno presents his standpoint in terms of a wide and
modern critique of laisser-fairism. General economic equilibrium
is put into question on the basis of new conceptions of time, uncertainty
and complementarities in production processes. Thus, "well
targeted policies may be of much help. [...] What these different
forms of intervention have in common is that they are based neither
on coercion nor on traditional incentives, but rather upon suasion
and negotiations".
Essay [470 KB]
|
| Essay:
Animal Spirits, Lumpy Investment and Endogenous
Business Cycles
Going well beyond Real Business
Cycle or New-Keynesian perspectives, this evolutionary model with
fully micro-founded heterogeneous bounded-rational agents is able
to generate self-sustaining patterns of long-term growth and endogenous
business cycles, delivering strong reasons for really observed stylized
facts (e.g. on investment, GDP,
consumption, employment
; unemployment rate; firm size
distributions).
Essay
|
| Essay:
Evaluating the benefits from liberalization in agriculture: are
standard Walrasian models relevant?
Jean-Marc Boussard, Françoise
Gérard, Marie Gabrielle Piketty from
INRA - CIRAD
shows that if (contrary to the strong versions of the "rational
expectation hypothesis"), agriculture producers do not take their
decisions on the basis of equilibrium prices only but take also
risk into account, then the market can generate very harmful seemingly
random fluctuations.
Liberalisation,
preventing price stabilisation policies, results in more instability,
and a decrease in welfare, as it is numerically demonstrated in
both a partial equilibrium model of the world sugar industry and
a GTAP-style general equilibrium model of the world economy.
Essay
|
| Key
concept: Costs
|
Essay:
Survival
strategies: innovate or die
To devise new modified
versions earlier than expected during the product life cycle can
costs you cannibalising your own product but leaves no room to competitors,
thus resulting in long-term business success.
Essay
|
| Essay:
Credit risk: a general scheme in a banking
perspective
What are the issues banks evaluate
for assessing credit risk when they are going to give a credit facility
to a borrower? This essay proposes a general synoptic scheme in
order to answer to this question. The problem is crucial not only
for the bank but also for the economy at large, since overall investment
and consumption are affected by
micro-decisions of this kind.
Essay
|
|
Economic
data: Stock exchange index for
10 markets (S&P500, Nikkei, Dax, Cac,...) - Daily quotes (1995-2000)
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| Key
concept: Interest
rates |
| Economic
data: Lending and deposit interest rates in 13 EU countries (1980-2001)
92 national interest
rates have been identified and allocated to ten broad categories
- six for lending rates and four for deposit rates.
MS Excel
[180 KB]
|
| Key
concept: Public
expenditure |
| Essay:
Quality and health system: two worlds
apart?
Can Quality
Management tools and principles, adapted to the peculiar features
of the public health sector, help to solve the main challenges this
system is presenting? Cost effectiveness, suitable solutions to
people's needs and requests, the full account of human and professional
relations could be better targeted using a Quality approach. This
essay sets the stage for a discussion on the subject.
Essay
|
| Essay:
Italy: Regional differences in public
health quality management systems
This short essay
presents a review of the various approaches applied by the different
Italian Regions with regard to Quality Management in health care
policy.
Essay
|
| Economic data:
Total
expenditure on health in OECD countries (1960-2000)
|
| Economic
data: Quality of education: 16
indicators (26 countries)
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| Key
concept: Exports
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| Software:
You are an exporter
This business game will improve your skills in exporting,
choosing target countries, fixing prices and quantities, while surfing
between business cycles and changes in the cost structure. You'll
better understand how the exchange
rate impacts on exports and imports.
Suitable for beginners and researchers.
Download it now
|
| Key
concept: Imports
|
| Economic data:
Inflation rates for 170 countries (1970-1996)
Yearly dynamics of inflation
is presented in one sheet. Is price stability a common feature of
the world economies? Is hyperinflation a disease that hurts some
groups of countries more than others? Discover the answers to these
and many other questions just analysing the real data.
MS Excel
|
Essay
and Software:
You are a monopolist
The traditional monopolist's choice about price and quantity is now
given a new dynamic setting where you can interact. Demand is unknown
and the produced good is durable across periods of time. Thus, sales
needn't be equal to production since inventories can pile up and go
down. A lot of strategic consequences arise, as you can discover playing
with the business game.
Software
[1900 KB] - Essay
|
| Software:
Costs
To understand costs in different microeconomic production conditions,
this software offers you a graphical representation of a wide variety
of combination of fixed-costs and variable costs (economies of scale,
dis-economies of scale...) activated by just a one-button click.
Software [2050
KB]
|
| Key
concept: Money |
| Key
concept: Balance
of payments |
| Key
concept: Employment |
| Key
concept: Unemployment
|
| Economic
data: Comparable wages for 162 jobs in 132 countries
The MS Excel file with a user-friendly
interface of the excellent dataset by Freeman
- Oostendorp. Long-term time-series from 1983 to 1999. This
data set allows for comparison of wages across countries for the
same job, over time, underlining the differences between skilled
and unskilled works.
MS Excel
[2.9 MB]
|
| Economic
data: Wages for 22 500 jobs across all industries
The wage distribution with means
and medians for a huge number of jobs. How much does a lawyer earn?
How many times is he paid more than a food preparation worker? Discover
wage inequality thanks to an authoritative US dataset.
MS Excel
[2.4 MB]
|
| Economic
data: Wages in New York
A city wage distribution.
MS Excel
[79 KB]
|
| Key
concept: Productivity
|
| Economic
data: Industry-level output, employment, costs, investment, capital
stocks over 38 years
An excellent dataset for studying
the evolution of hundreds of industries.
MS Excel
[4 MB]
|
| Economic
data: Oil world prices (1861-1999)
A very long time-series of a
crucial price for the world economy. Gain new insights in inflation
tides and business cycles.
MS Excel
[7 KB]
|
Software:
The IS-LM model
A Cartesian-space IS-LM model illustrating
step-by-step how the curves arises from points. It reproduces what
usually students learn in universities throughout the world, offering
the possibility of changing the model parameters. It is a second example
of Prof. Masaru
Uzawa's collection of software.
Software [340
KB]
|
| Economic
data: EU data for all the variables in IS-LM model (Germany,
France, Italy, Spain, UK, Switzerland and other 13 European countries)
MS
Excel [550 KB]
|
| Economic
data: Data for all the variables in IS-LM model
Comprehensive of 54 variables
in long-term annual and quarterly time-series, this US dataset is
excellent for students to test the model as well as for researchers
to develop original reflections.
MS
Excel [104 KB]
|
| Economic
data: Long-term interest rates in OECD countries (1982-1998)
A small dataset on interest
rates in developed countries.
MS Excel
[5 KB]
|
| Economic
data: Coffee world prices (1982 - 2000)
Look at the difference in prices for consumers
in importing countries and for growers in exporters country. Seasonality
analysis feasible, since they are monthly data.
MS Excel
[80 KB]
|
| Economic
data: Cocoa beans world prices (1971 - 2001)
MS Excel
[5 KB]
|
| Economic
data: World primary commodity prices (54 time series) - Agricolture
Raw Materials, Metals (e.g. Zinc, Iron, Aluminium, Copper), Fertilizers,
Petroleum, Natural Gas, etc. (1980-2001) MS
Excel
|
| Key
concept: Price
level |
| Economic data:
93 Food products prices in 198 countries (1985-2001)
The price of sugar, milk, meat
and many more foodstuffs. Ideal to compare price structures over
countries and time. By transforming these local-currency data in
dollars, you can test the "one
price law", according to which any good has the same price worldwide,
after taken into account nominal
exchange rates. Comparing with world
wages, you get the real purchasing power of people in food terms.
MS Excel
|
| Economic
data: Environmental taxes in 15 countries (1980-1999)
MS
Excel
|
| Key
concept:
Elasticity
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| |