Causality, Uncertainty and Identification: Three Issues on the Spatial Econometrics Agenda

This paper offers a personal view on recent developments in the field of spatial econometrics. The approach is subjective and certainly biased. I focus on three issues that I consider of the utmost importance and which are at the basis of the discipline, namely spatial causality, the question of identification in spatial models, and the problem of selecting the (most appropriate) spatial weighting matrix. These three topics are receiving increasing attention in the spatial econometrics literature, although there are still many issues to be resolved. They will most likely be areas of intense activity in the near future.