Regional science is a field of the social sciences concerned with analytical approaches to problems that are specifically urban, rural, or regional. Topics in regional science include, but are not limited to location theory or spatial economics, location modeling, transportation, migration analysis, land use and urban development, interindustry analysis, environmental and ecological analysis, resource management, urban and regional policy analysis, geographical information systems, and spatial data analysis. In the broadest sense, any social science analysis that has a spatial dimension is embraced by regional scientists.
Economic geography is the subfield of human geography that studies economic activity and factors affecting it. It can also be considered a subfield or method in economics. There are four branches of economic geography.
Landscape ecology is the science of studying and improving relationships between ecological processes in the environment and particular ecosystems. This is done within a variety of landscape scales, development spatial patterns, and organizational levels of research and policy. Landscape ecology can be described as the science of "landscape diversity" as the synergetic result of biodiversity and geodiversity.
One of the major subfields of urban economics, economies of agglomeration, explains, in broad terms, how urban agglomeration occurs in locations where cost savings can naturally arise. This term is most often discussed in terms of economic firm productivity. However, agglomeration effects also explain some social phenomena, such as large proportions of the population being clustered in cities and major urban centers. Similar to economies of scale, the costs and benefits of agglomerating increase the larger the agglomerated urban cluster becomes. Several prominent examples of where agglomeration has brought together firms of a specific industry are: Silicon Valley and Los Angeles being hubs of technology and entertainment, respectively, in California, United States; and London, United Kingdom, being a hub of finance.
Masahisa Fujita is a Japanese economist who has studied regional science, urban economics, international trade, and spatial economy. He is a professor at Konan University and an adjunct professor at Institute of Economic Research, Kyoto University.
Spatial analysis is any of the formal techniques which studies entities using their topological, geometric, or geographic properties. Spatial analysis includes a variety of techniques using different analytic approaches, especially spatial statistics. It may be applied in fields as diverse as astronomy, with its studies of the placement of galaxies in the cosmos, or to chip fabrication engineering, with its use of "place and route" algorithms to build complex wiring structures. In a more restricted sense, spatial analysis is geospatial analysis, the technique applied to structures at the human scale, most notably in the analysis of geographic data. It may also be applied to genomics, as in transcriptomics data.
Regional economics is a sub-discipline of economics and is often regarded as one of the fields of the social sciences. It addresses the economic aspect of the regional problems that are spatially analyzable so that theoretical or policy implications can be the derived with respect to regions whose geographical scope ranges from local to global areas.
Time geography or time-space geography is an evolving transdisciplinary perspective on spatial and temporal processes and events such as social interaction, ecological interaction, social and environmental change, and biographies of individuals. Time geography "is not a subject area per se", but rather an integrative ontological framework and visual language in which space and time are basic dimensions of analysis of dynamic processes. Time geography was originally developed by human geographers, but today it is applied in multiple fields related to transportation, regional planning, geography, anthropology, time-use research, ecology, environmental science, and public health. According to Swedish geographer Bo Lenntorp: "It is a basic approach, and every researcher can connect it to theoretical considerations in her or his own way."
Luc E. Anselin is one of the developers of the field of spatial econometrics.
Anil K. Bera is an Indian-American econometrician. He is Professor of Economics at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign's Department of Economics. He is most noted for his work with Carlos Jarque on the Jarque–Bera test.
The Journal of Geographical Systems is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by Springer Science+Business Media. It covers geographical information, mathematical modeling, analysis, theory, regional science, geography, environmental sciences, planning, and decision. The journal was founded by Manfred M. Fischer and Arthur Getis, who both served as founding editors-in-chief. The current editors-in-chief are Manfred M. Fischer and Antonio Páez.
Gerhard Tintner was an Austrian economist who worked most of his career in the United States. Tintner is known for his contributions during the formation years of econometrics as a discipline. In a festschrift in honor of Tintner's 60th birthday, Karl A. Fox lauded Tintner as one of the "foremost econometricians of our time."
Andrés Rodríguez-Pose is a professor of economic geography at the London School of Economics and Political Science and former head of its Department of Geography and Environment (2006-2009).
Isabelle Thomas is a professor of geography at the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium and research director of the National Fund for Scientific Research. She is member of the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE)
Roger Simon Bivand is a British geographer, economist and professor at the Norwegian School of Economics. He specialises in open source software for spatial analysis, and played a major role in developing functions for spatial data in the R statistical programming language, including the R packages sp, rgdal, maptools and rgrass7. His book Applied Spatial Data Analysis with R (2008), coauthored with Edzer Pebesma and Virgilio Gómez-Rubio, is considered "the authoritative resource on R's spatial capabilities".
Budy P. Resosudarmo is a professor in development and environmental economics at the Arndt-Corden Department of Economics, Crawford School of Public Policy, at the Australian National University (ANU). He is the head of the ANU Indonesia Project. He was the education director of the Crawford School for the 2021-2022 period and the deputy director of the ANU Poverty and Inequality Research Centre for the 2019-2023 period. Since 2022, he has been a Fellow of the Regional Science Association International.
Research Policy is a monthly peer-reviewed academic journal published by Elsevier on behalf of the Science Policy Research Unit. It was established by British economist Christopher Freeman in 1971 and is regarded as the leading journal in the field of innovation studies. It is listed as one of the 50 journals used by the Financial Times to compile its business-school research ranks.
Jan K. Brueckner is an American economist, academic, author and researcher. He is a Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of California, Irvine. Brueckner has published over 150 papers. His research interests fall into areas encompassing urban economics, public economics, and real estate finance. He has also worked extensively in the field of industrial organization, focusing particularly on the economics of the airline industry. He is also the author of a textbook entitled Lectures on Urban Economics.
Arthur Getis was an American geographer known for his significant contributions to spatial statistics and geographic information science (GIScience). With a career spanning over four decades, Getis authored more than one hundred peer-reviewed papers and book chapters, greatly influencing GIScience and geography as a whole. The Getis-Ord family of statistics, one of the most commonly used in spatial analysis, is based on his and J. Keith Ord's work and is still widely used in the creation of hot spot maps.
Jacques-François Thisse is a Belgian economist, author, and academic. Thisse is Professor Emeritus of Economics and Regional Science at the Catholic University of Louvain and at the École des Ponts ParisTech. Thisse’s work is related to location theory and its applications to various economic fields in which the heterogeneity of agents matters. This includes industrial organisation, urban and spatial economics, local public finance, international trade, and voting. He has published more than 200 papers in scientific journals, including Econometrica, American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Political Economy, and Operations Research.
