Bart Verspagen is a Full Professor of International Economic Relations, specialised in the economics of technological change. He did his undergraduate studies at the University of Limburg (now called Maastricht University) in Maastricht, the Netherlands, from 1984 – 1988. After that, he obtained a PhD degree from the same university in 1992. During the five years after that, he held a scholarship from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). His workplace is the Economics Department of Maastricht University, as well as the research institute UNU-Merit in Maastricht. At the university, he holds the chair of International Economics. Bart Verspagen’s research interests are fairly broad. The centre area is the process of economic growth, and its relation to technological change. This also brings him into areas such as international trade theory, industrial dynamics, economic and technology history, and applied econometrics, statistics and mathematical modelling. With regard to the latter, he has mainly been applying evolutionary theory to economics. This includes simulation modelling of international economies. His research themes address the relationships between technological change, productivity, economic growth and socio-economic development at the macro level. He focuses on a range of questions with respect to the impact of innovation and technological change on productivity, growth, employment, human capital, inequality, poverty, sustainability and socio-economic development. These questions are studied in an international comparative perspective including advanced economies in Europe and elsewhere, developing economies and economies in transition.
His most recent publications include:
Los, B. and B. Verspagen, 2009, ‘Localized innovation, localized diffusion and the environment: an analysis of reductions of CO2 emissions by passenger cars’, Journal of Evolutionary Economics, vol. 19, pp. 507-526.
Verspagen, B., 2009, ‘The use of modeling tools for policy in evolutionary environments’, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, vol. 76, pp. 453-461.
Fagerberg, J. and B. Verspagen, 2009, ‘Innovation studies – The emerging structure of a new scientific field’, Research Policy, vol. 38, pp. 218-233.
Academic Profile by
Aikaterini Kokkinou, University of Glasgow