Capa wps - FEP - Working Papers - Universidade do Porto

Table 2: Distribution (%) of main themes and methodology (n=1936)
Themes/Method Formal Appreciative
Formal+
Empirical
Appreciative
+Empirical
Empirical Survey Total
Consumers and
organizations
behaviour
Technological and
Industrial
dynamics
Technical change,
Growth and
Business Cycle
38,9 33,6 3,5 11,4 11,4 1,3 11,8
23,8 25,6 5,2 15,1 29,1 1,2 8,9
55,1 17,3 7,9 4,7 9,4 5,5 6,6
Institutions 20,0 54,0 3,3 13,3 8,0 1,3 7,7
Development,
Environment and
Policy
15,0 52,6 1,5 19,7 9,1 2,2 14,2
Games 91,3 3,1 2,0 0,0 0,0 3,6 18,4
HET and
Methodology
1,8 95,4 0,2 0,5 0,0 2,1 29,0
Regional 23,1 30,8 4,6 21,5 16,9 3,1 3,4
Total 32,1 48,3 2,4 7,7 7,0 2,4 100,0
Source: Authors’ own computations based on journals’ articles collected from the Econlit database, 1969-2005.
The following figures show quite clearly that whichever the sub-categories in the ‘HET and
Methodology’ and ‘Games’ categories there is a noticeable pattern towards one unique method –
appreciative in the first case and formal in the second. In contrast, in ‘Technical change, Growth
and Business Cycle’ theme, the pattern is more diffuse. In concrete, for the most important
categories – ‘Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics’ (25%) and ‘Economic Development,
Technological Change and ‘Growth’ (51%) – all types of methods are use with formal rising as the
most frequent approach.
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