Economics in IIASA's Work: Activities and Opportunities (Workshop presentation)

Kryazhimskiy, A.V. (2010). Economics in IIASA's Work: Activities and Opportunities (Workshop presentation). NSFC-IIASA Workshop on Drivers of Global Transformation, 8 October 2010, Beijing, China

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Abstract

This presentation consists of three parts: an outline of the recent history of IIASA's research activities in the area of economic development; a brief discussion of questions for future research; and thoughts on approaches to responding those questions.

The historical sketch touches upon IIASA's earlier research addressing various aspects of economic development; the program on technological development run jointly by IIASA and Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2000-2008; the initiative of several National Member Organizations, aimed at establishing research on economic growth at IIASA (2004-2005); and the internal cross-program Driving Forces of Economic Growth initiative (www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/ECG) set up in 2007.

The questions proposed for future research are motivated by experiences from IIASA's earlier work. A departure point would be viewing economic development as part of a larger socio-environmental system. A sharper view suggests that economic development is the interface between economic drivers and economic constraints. Economic drivers include, along with traditionally analyzed factors such as human capital and technological innovation, also the very modern ones - infrastructures development, institutional systems, knowledge exchange, and others - whose impact on the pace of economic development has not been studied in that detail. Economic constraints emerge, primarily, as feedbacks from the environment, in forms of climate change, natural disasters, exhaustible resources, etc. The research questions to be addressed can, therefore, be embedded into a general problem formulation - how to develop economic drivers under economic constraints?

Applied systems analysis - IIASA's research paradigm - may help IIASA effectively address such questions and define IIASA's specific niche in research on global economic development. In particular, a useful approach would be representing/modeling the economy as a dynamic network that interconnects different economic drivers and different economic constraints through input-output- and feedback-type relationships, with taking into account possible hindrances and shocks in the network's operation. Another approach would be justification and assessment of scenarios of economic development. Systems analysis assumes that modeling and analytic approaches are complemented by regional case studies. Recent efforts undertaken by IIASA scientists and experts from Delhi Institute of Economic Growth indicated a way toward developing a pilot case study - India.

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