Microsimulation for Urban and Regional Policy Analysis

It is becoming more widely recognized that to move towards better dynamic representations of urban and regional processs, analytical frameworks are needed which simulate the characteristics and behaviour of individuals rather than of groups or aggregates of individuals. This volume reports progress with microsimulation, a methdology aimed at building large-scale data sets on the attributes of individuals or households on the demand side of the economy, and individual firms or organizations on the supply side. It details how these data sets may be estimated, linked and updated through the modelling of events and interactions. Although microsimulation is not a new methodology per se, the book brings together a set of largely European researchers interested in spatial or regional applications as opposed to typically national studies. By specifying the characteristics of each household in the region and their access to income, health, education, welfare, for example, the models can offer new insights into quality of life debates. It can also estimate the impacts of a wide range of social, as well as area-based policies, such as changes to income tax and transfer payments.
Since households are explicitly linked to individual firms and organizations, traditional impact studies common in regional science work (say of firm closures) can be tackled at the level of individual households and small geographical regions instead of large regions only. The collection of papers in this volume present some research agendas for a new urban and regional geography at the microscale, plus some early examples of applications which show the usefulness of the technique for policy analysis, particularly for linking data from various sources to provide new estimates of relationships previously unknown.