Description:

The COST Action aims at developing a more sophisticated modelling of the EU visualised as an evolving network with a specific topology determined by the number and strength of national, regional and local links. Economic policies should be specifically designed to take into account this pervasive network structure assessing the position of backward locations within the network and focussing on instruments that favour interconnections. The expected results will provide a basis for an improved evaluation of such policies, in particular for the European Cohesion policy, considering their impact on the welfare level of EU citizens and its geographical distribution. To achieve this objective this Action will enhance interdisciplinary networking combining recent approaches in economics with the most advanced mathematical and computational methods for analysing complex and non-linear systems. The contributions of researchers from Bielefeld University within this Action lie primarily in the analysis of strategic location choice decisions of firms using differential game methods and the evaluation of different types of cohesion policy measures in the framework of agent-based policy models.