In the previous text we considered statistical information from various sources, exhibiting sustained economic growth of Baltic countries. Now with some confidence we can conclude that even world financial crises has made only short-term impact on the stable growth trend. The Baltic States once again are taking economic growth leadership in EU and will seek to sustain these positions in the nearest future.

The particular role of exports in the recovered economic growth confirms presumptions regarding exceptional manifestation of Balassa-Samuelson effect in Baltics. Nevertheless, one needs more arguments, why this effect contributes more in the development of Baltic region then others. For example, the Visegrad countries, having a similar level of gross domestic product (GDP), should have the same development rate. In this contribution we would like to draw your attention at the statistics of gross earnings, leaving details of macroeconomic modeling aside, as labor earning is a key parameter in all models.

Collective behavior of the individuals in the complex socio-economic systems is influenced by their herding, group, behavior tendencies and their individual preferences. The herding tendencies imply the possibility to control the collective behavior. In this text we discuss this possibility through the context of Kirman's agent-based herding model.

The possibility to control the collective behavior can be clearly seen by taking the social systems as a primary example. In this case we usually have a large uninformed population. Members of this population may not have the necessary skills (or information) to make certain decision, namely they cannot make independent decision on their own. So the uninformed individuals have to rely on the individuals with necessary skills (or information) for advice. They are usually a very small part of the society, yet they are able to shape the behavior on the collective level. Actually this is confirmed by the experiments [1]. Thus we see that the possibility to control the collective behavior is not very unrealistic idea, and therefore it is very interesting topic to be studied.

A three-year PhD student position on Agent-based Computational Economics, starting January 1st 2014, is available at the Department of Mechanical, Energetics, Management and Transport Englineering of the University of Genova, Italy.

Research will be focused on agent-based macroeconomics and financial stability issues within the framework of a new EU funded three-year project starting on October 1st, 2013. The EU project aims to develop an innovative agent-based platform and ICT tools for designing and testing policies and regulatory measures for preventing and mitigating economic and financial crises and fostering an economically and ecologically sustainable growth path.

The PhD candidate will work with the agent-based software platform EURACE and is expected to contribute to its further development.

Applicants should have a Master degree in Engineering, Science or Economics with an adequate background in programming, data analysis and statistics.

Recently I have discovered an online education system Coursera. While browsing through the available courses I noticed one named "Social and Economic Networks: Models and Analysis". Sadly it was already six weeks into the eight week program, so I was not able to formally complete it. Yet the knowledge I have obtained by viewing videos of this course enabled me to prepare couple of posts for this website.

Previously, I have already written about the Erdos-Renyi and the Watts-Strogatz ("small world" networks) network formation models. This time I'll write about the Barabasi-Albert model ("scale-free" networks).

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