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Liveanomics: Urban liveability and economic growth is the second of two Economist Intelligence Unit reports, commissioned by Philips, which examine the issue of liveability in cities. The  rst report in the series addressed what city residents want from their cities, and how city leaders can deliver on citizens' requirements. This second report examines the role of business within cities. The Economist Intelligence Unit bears sole responsibility for the content of this report. The  ndings and views expressed within do not necessarily re ect the views of Philips.

T he Complexity Challenge is an Economist Intelligence Unit report that investigates the rise of complexity in business and the challenges that increasing complexity creates. The report was commissioned by RBS. The Economist Intelligence Unit bears sole responsibility for the content of this report. Our editorial team executed the online survey, conducted the interviews and wrote the report. 

The Council of Economic Advisers, an agency within the Executive Office of the President, is charged with offering the President objective economic advice on the formulation of both domestic and international economic policy. The Council bases its recommendations and analysis on economic research and empirical evidence, using the best data available to support the President in setting our nation's economic policy. The Council is currently comprised of a Chairman and two Members. The Chairman is Jason Furman. The Council's members are Sandra Black and Jay Shambaugh. The Council is supported by a staff of professional senior economists, staff economists and research assistants, as well as a statistical office.

"Full exploitation of a technology can take far longer than that. Innovation and technology, though talked of almost interchangeably, are not the same thing. Innovation is what people newly know how to do. Technology is what they are actually doing; and that is what matters to the economy. Steel boxes and diesel engines have been around since the 1900s, and their use together in containerised shipping goes back to the 1950s. But their great impact as the backbone of global trade did not come for decades after that."

AMERICAN employment put in a respectable performance in July. Non-farm payrolls rose 117,000, or 0.1%, and the unemployment rate edged lower to 9.1% from 9.2%, both better, but not dramatically so, than Wall Street had expected.

This house believes that America needs substantial new fiscal stimulus.

YouGov is a professional research and consulting organization, pioneering the use of technology to collect higher quality, in-depth data for companies, governments, and institutions so that they can better serve the people that sustain them. Used by the Economist

The American economy is running on empty. That's the hypothesis put forward by Robert J. Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University. Let's assume for a moment that he's right. The political consequences would be enormous.

Inspired by the legacy of Franklin and Eleanor, the Roosevelt Institute reimagines America as it should be: a place where hard work is rewarded, everyone participates, and everyone enjoys a fair share of our collective prosperity. We believe that when the rules work against this vision, it's our responsibility to recreate them. We bring together thousands of thinkers and doers-from a new generation of leaders in every state to Nobel laureate economists-working to redefine the rules that guide our social and economic realities. We rethink and reshape everything from local policy to federal legislation, orienting toward a new economic and political system: one built by many for the good of all.

To support its mission, the World Bank publishes and disseminates a large selection of knowledge products. World Bank Publications produces such authoritative reports as the World Development Report and Doing Business, featuring research from top development economists and practitioners.

This is what Jane Jacobs taught us long ago in her book The Economy of Cities. This is what the Nobel Prize winning economist Robert Lucas meant when he formalized Jacob's argument into a theory of "human capital externalities" that stem from the dense clustering of people in cities as the basic mechanism of economic growth. Cities themselves power economic progress, driving artistic, technological, and overall economic growth at one and the same time.

The Center for American Progress held a forum on economic growth and equality. After opening remarks from Vanessa Cárdenas and Angela Glover Blackwell, members of the first panel talked about the link between economic growth and equality. Economist Emmanuel Saez in his presentation used graphs to show the relationship between equitable distribution of wealth and economic growth.

From Original Minds: Conversations with CBC's Eleanor Wahctel. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Copyright © 2003 by Eleanor Wachtel. All rights reserved. Jane Jacobs is variously known as the guru of cities, an urban legend-"part analyst, part activist, part prophet." In the more than forty years since the publication of her groundbreaking book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), her influence has been extraordinary-not only on architects, community workers, and planners but also on Nobel Prize-winning economists and ecologists. As one critic recently put it, "Jacobs's influence confirms that books matter. It isn't easy to cite another writer who has had a comparable impact in our time."

OK, this post is already way too long, but one final thing. Physicists, I think, become even more drawn to economics when we look into economics and see broad resistance to research pursuing this "complexity" perspective. It seems instead that most of mainstream research tries to get around system complexity with mathematical tricks, rather than facing up to it. I'm thinking about ideas like representative agents, or rational expectations. The assumptions make it possible to build models without having to deal with the complexity of interactions and the emergent structures they create; but the resulting models, naturally, look very pale and questionable as models of anything real. When physicists see that a small minority of ("heterodox") economists also find the standard approach hugely limiting, they feel an urge to help out. And they believe that some of their ideas can help.

SFI's Cities, Scaling, and Sustainability research effort is creating an interdisciplinary approach and quantitative synthesis of organizational and dynamical aspects of human social organizations, with an emphasis on cities. Different disciplinary perspectives are being integrated in terms of the search for similar dependences of urban indicators on population size - scaling analysis - and other variables that characterize the system as a whole. A particularly important focus of this research area is to develop theoretical insights about cities that can inform quantitative analyses of their long-term sustainability in terms of the interplay between innovation, resource appropriation, and consumption and the make up of their social and economic activity. This focus area brings together urban planners, economists, sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists, and complex system theorists with the aim of generating an integrated and quantitative understanding of cities. Outstanding areas of research include the identification of general scaling patterns in urban infrastructure and dynamics around the world, the quantification of resource distribution networks in cities and their interplay with the city's socioeconomic fabric, issues of temporal acceleration and spatial density, and the long-term dynamics of urban systems.

Economic historians long reckoned that enclosure, though unjust and brutal, spurred progress and laid the groundwork for industrialisation. Large tracts could be farmed more productively, freeing labourers to work in urban factories while also providing food to support them. "The break-up of the peasantry was the price England paid…to feed her growing population," wrote Peter Mathias, an economic historian, in 1983. The Industrial Revolution seemed to bury the concept of the commons for good.

CEPR is based on what was (in 1983) a new model of organization, a "thinknet". It is a distributed network of economists, who are affiliated with but not employed by CEPR, and who collaborate through the Centre on a wide range of policy-related research projects and dissemination activities. CEPR was founded at a time when European economics had relatively few "centres of excellence" with international reach but many excellent researchers, widely dispersed, with few opportunities for interaction. One of CEPR's main achievements has been to create a virtual "centre of excellence" for European economics through an active community of dispersed individual researchers, working together across international boundaries to produce high-quality research for use by the policy community and the private sector.

The closing keynote at the Economist Conferences Event, "Creating tomorrow's liveable cities", presented byProfessor Jan Gehl, founding partner of Gehl Architects,Copenhagen. This video provides a good deal of information on the benefits bicycling and walking have on a livable community when integrated into the community landscape.

It's our mission to supply a live stream of continuous, accurate data and insight into what people are thinking and doing all over the world, all of the time, so that companies, governments and institutions can better serve the people that sustain them.

Capitalists seem almost uninterested in capitalism, even as entrepreneurs eager to start companies find that they can't get financing. Businesses and investors sound like the Ancient Mariner, who complained of "Water, water everywhere - nor any drop to drink." It's a paradox, and at its nexus is what I'll call the Doctrine of New Finance, which is taught with increasingly religious zeal by economists, and at times even by business professors like me who have failed to challenge it. This doctrine embraces measures of profitability that guide capitalists away from investments that can create real economic growth.