International Eurasian Academy of Sciences, IEAS

Academician

Manfred M. Fischer

Profile:

Elected Academician of the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences on 27 May 1995, Professor Manfred M. Fischer is a distinguished Austrian regional scientist and a leading architect of modern spatial econometrics and quantitative economic geography. Born in Nuremberg, Germany, on 25 February 1947, he earned his Dr. rer. nat. summa cum laude in geography and mathematics from Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg in 1975, followed by his habilitation in human geography from the University of Vienna in 1982. After beginning his academic career at the University of Vienna, he was appointed Professor and Chair of Economic Geography at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) in 1988, where he directed the Institute for Economic Geography and GIScience from 1989 to 2015 and served as Dean of the Social Sciences from 2004 to 2009. Now Emeritus Professor at WU and Adjunct Professor at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, he is the only scholar to have received all three of the Regional Science Association International’s highest honours: the RSAI Fellows Award (2006), the Jean Paelinck Award for Regional Science Methods (2015), and the RSAI Founder’s Medal (2016). He is also a Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Back to list page →

His research has been instrumental in incorporating spatial dimensions into economic analysis through spatial econometrics, geocomputation, and increasingly artificial intelligence. As co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Geographical Systems since 1993, co-founder of Springer’s Advances in Spatial Science series, and co-editor of the Handbook of Regional Science (2021), he has helped shape the methodological development of regional science for more than three decades. His scholarly output comprises over 400 publications, including more than 260 peer-reviewed articles and chapters and 20 monographs, with an h-index of 51 and more than 11,000 citations. The five selected publications below—addressing spatial dependence in trade panels (Journal of Geographical Systems, 2020), regional housing responses to monetary policy (Real Estate Economics, 2019), Markov-switching factor-augmented VAR models (Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 2018), spatial growth regressions (Spatial Economic Analysis, 2008), and rough-set classification of interval-valued information systems (International Journal of Approximate Reasoning, 2008)—reflect a career dedicated to strengthening the spatial analytical foundations of modern economics and connecting methodological innovation with empirical and policy applications.