The conception of this volume was inspired by recent developments in two strands of economic theorising. The first one consists of various lines of research on structural economic dynamics. Here, early work by John R. Hicks on traverse analysis, by Luigi L. Pasinetti on disproportional growth and by Richard M. Goodwin on methods of dynamic decomposition and economic fluctuations lay the basis upon which further contributions in the theory of structural change analysis were made. The other strand goes back to Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen who, in a number of contributions, pointed towards an organisational theory of production activity (based upon the interrelationships between tasks, fund factors and material transformations) which has inspired us in our own work.

What emerges from these two strands is that structural change can be approached in two ways: one way is ‘macro to micro’ analysis where the focus is to keep a comprehensive view of the dynamics of the economic system as a whole while decomposing the latter into sub-units (such as processes, industries, vertically integrated sectors, eigensectors, and so on) so that the disaggregated dynamics of structural adaptation and compositional change can be represented. The other way is ‘micro to macro’ in which the starting point is a richer representation of micro-organisational features of micro-units leading to the analysis of ‘network’ relationships within and amongst such sub-units. In both these two types of approaches, methods of decomposition (of a static and dynamic kind) feature prominently and seem to play a crucial role in the analytical representation of structural change processes.