spatial econometrics: a rapidly evolving discipline

Spatial econometrics has a relatively short history in the scenario of the scientific thought. Indeed, the term “spatial econometrics” was introduced only forty years ago during the general address delivered by Jean Paelinck to the annual meeting of the Dutch Statistical Association in May 1974 (see [1]). However, even if the discipline can be considered still in its adolescence compared with the more general realm of econometrics (which is almost 50 years older), its adolescence was anything but quiet, being continuously troubled by a sequence of serious challenges linked with the evolution of widespread computer technologies in the eighties, with the development of the New Economic Geography theories in the nineties and, finally, with the explosion of the Big Spatial Data revolution starting from the first years of the new millennium