Pathways for socio-economic system transitions expressed as a Markov chain.

Autor: Schweizer VJ; Climate and Global Dynamics Division, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, United States of America.; Department of Knowledge Integration, Faculty of Environment, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada., Jamieson-Lane AD; Mathematics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.; Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment, Campus Wechloy, University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Lower Saxony, Germany., Cai H; School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States of America.; Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States of America., Lehner S; Institute of Air Transportation Systems, German Aerospace Center (DLR), Hamburg, Germany., Smerlak M; Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: PloS one [PLoS One] 2023 Jul 31; Vol. 18 (7), pp. e0288928. Date of Electronic Publication: 2023 Jul 31 (Print Publication: 2023).
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0288928
Abstrakt: Cross-impact balance (CIB) analysis provides a system-theoretical view of scenarios useful for investigating complex socio-economic systems. CIB can synthesize a variety of qualitative or quantitative inputs and return information suggestive of system evolution. Current software tools for CIB are limited to identifying system attractors as well as describing system evolution from only one scenario of initial conditions at a time. Through this study, we enhance CIB by developing and applying a method that considers all possible system evolutions as transitions in a Markov chain. We investigated a simple three-variable system (27 possible scenarios) of the demographic transition and were able to generally replicate the findings of traditional CIB. Through our experiments with four possible approaches to produce CIB Markov chains, we found that information about transition pathways is gained; however, information about system attractors may be lost. Through a comparison of model results to a recent literature review on human demography, we found that low-income countries are more likely to remain stuck in a demographic trap if economic development is not prioritized alongside educational gains. Future work could test our comparative methodological findings for systems comprised of more than three variables.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
(Copyright: © 2023 Schweizer et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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