Spatial Econometrics: A Rapidly Evolving Discipline

Spatial econometrics has a relatively short history in the scenario of the scientific thought. Indeed, the term “spatial econometrics” was introduced only forty years ago during the general address delivered by Jean Paelinck to the annual meeting of the Dutch Statistical Association in May 1974 (see [1]). However, even if the discipline can be considered still in its adolescence compared with the more general realm of econometrics (which is almost 50 years older), its adolescence was anything but quiet, being continuously troubled by a sequence of serious challenges linked with the evolution of widespread computer technologies in the eighties, with the development of the New Economic Geography theories in the nineties and, finally, with the explosion of the Big Spatial Data revolution starting from the first years of the new millennium. The interest in the discipline has had a particularly dramatic improvement in the last two decades which recorded an incredible increase in the number of applied disciplines interested in the subject and, consistently, of the number of papers that have appeared in scientific journals. In a comprehensive review which appeared a few years ago, Arbia [2] surveyed 237 papers devoted to the subject that were published in the five years from 2007 to 2011 with an accelerated increasing trend. Trying to identify at least the major application fields we can mention subjects such as regional economics, criminology, public finance, industrial organization, political sciences, psychology, agricultural economics, health economics, demography, epidemiology, managerial economics, urban planning, education, land use, social sciences, economic development, innovation diffusion, environmental studies, history, labour, resources and energy economics, transportation, food security, real estate, marketing. But the list of applied disciplines that can benefit from the advances in spatial econometrics is, in fact, a lot longer and likely to further increase in the future. Compared to only few years ago also the number of textbooks available to introduce new adepts to the discipline has also raised. To the two traditional textbooks by Paelinch and Klaassen (1979) [1] and by Anselin (1988) [3] that each represented for many years (and still represent) the “bible” for the new acolytes, a list of new volumes was added in the last ten years (e.g., [4–8]) that can introduce the topic to scholars at various levels of depths and formalization. The explosion of the number of scholars working on the subject is also witnessed by the creation of the Spatial Econometrics Association in 2006, a scientific society that promotes annual general meetings, together with a large number of workshops, seminars and summer schools all over the world 1. In this atmosphere of feverish ferment in 2014 a call for papers was launched for a special issue of Econometrics devoted to the subject. The call attracted a good number of submissions and the selected papers are collected in the present issue. The success of this special issue in terms of number and quality of submissions led to the decision to launch a call for a second special issue on “Recent developments in Spatial Econometrics”, (associated with the 10th Annual Conference of the Spatial Econometrics Association) which will be opened later in 2016.