ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that economic development should be seen as a non-linear system because economies make themselves up as they go along. In seeking an economic theory that more closely explains the complexity of markets, some economists have turned to the idea of open systems of the sort found in nature. In the early 1990s, Poland invited economists from Harvard University to advise on the creation of a market economy. According to Jane Jacobs, the crucially dynamic economic systems occur not at the national level, but rather in city regions. Human behaviour combined with the non-linear dynamics of open economic systems cannot but mean otherwise. Successful economic regions, based around dynamic cities, are places of complex variety where new work is added to old work to produce new products, processes and services. The important measurement of economic growth is not therefore aggregate levels of GDP across a country, but rather the economic health of key growth cities and their regions.
