An economics book which has received rave international reviews has earned a University of Queensland academic a prestigious international economics prize.
Lecturer in macroeconomics Dr Jason Potts is the first Australian to win The Schumpeter Prize (valued at about $A16,000) given every two years by the Schumpeter Society and sponsored by the German business weekly WirtschaftsWoche.
It is awarded for the best work in the broad fields of technological change and innovation, economic growth, entrepreneurship and market processes. This is only the second time the award has gone to researchers outside of USA or Europe, and the first time to Australia.
Dr Potts received the award in Manchester for his forthcoming book The New Evolutionary Microeconomics: Complexity, Competence and Adaptive Behaviour. (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar).
He shares this year's award with Professor Brian Loasby, from the University of Stirling in Scotland, author of Knowledge, Institutions and Evolution in Economics.
Dr Potts said the Schumpeter Society was a group of about 400 researchers scattered all over the world who conducted economic research on Schumpeterian themes.
"Joseph Schumpeter, the namesake of the society, was a famous economist (1887-1950) on the same scale as Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes," he said.
"He wrote several famous books about the nature of market capitalism, and the importance of viewing it as an evolutionary process driven by technological change and 'creative-destruction', and also of the role of the entrepreneur. Industries such as software or biotech are precisely the sort of thing that he would recognise as conforming to his descriptions."
Dr Potts' book is a monograph developed from his PhD thesis at Lincoln University, New Zealand on the foundations of evolutionary economics.
He develops the conceptual and theoretical foundation for a new system of microeconomics based on the metaphor of evolution and the analytical structure of a complex system.
Principally a work of meta-theory, the book argues for a radical refocus of microeconomic research toward the evolutionary nature of institutions, preferences, technology and knowledge. It reveals that the unifying principle in this endeavour is the concept of incomplete but dynamic connections in the geometry of economic space.
Media: For further information, contact Dr Jason Potts, telephone 07 3365 6562.
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