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Related papers: The Building Blocks of Economic Complexity

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By borrowing methods from complex system analysis, in this paper we analyze the features of the complex relationship that links the development and the industrialization of a country to economic inequality. In order to do this, we identify…

General Economics · Economics 2019-09-10 Angelica Sbardella , Emanuele Pugliese , Luciano Pietronero

Estimating the capabilities, or inputs of production, that drive and constrain the economic development of urban areas has remained a challenging goal. We posit that capabilities are instantiated in the complexity and sophistication of…

Physics and Society · Physics 2021-09-17 Andres Gomez-Lievano , Oscar Patterson-Lomba

We propose a combinatorial model of economic development. An economy develops by acquiring new capabilities allowing for the production of an ever greater variety of products of increasingly complex products. Taking into account that…

General Economics · Economics 2019-03-20 Alje van Dam , Koen Frenken

Knowhow in societies accumulates as it gets transmitted from group to group, and from generation to generation. However, we lack of a unified quantitative formalism that takes into account the structured process for how this accumulation…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-10-15 Andres Gomez-Lievano

Structural change consists of industrial diversification towards more productive, knowledge intensive activities. However, changes in the productive structure bear inherent links with job creation and income distribution. In this paper, we…

General Economics · Economics 2026-05-13 Bernardo Caldarola , Dario Mazzilli , Aurelio Patelli , Angelica Sbardella

A rich theoretical and empirical literature investigated the link between export diversification and firm performance. Prior theoretical works hinted at the key role of capability accumulation in shaping production activities and…

General Economics · Economics 2025-07-30 Valerio De Stefano , Maddalena Mula , Manuel Sebastian Mariani , Andrea Zaccaria

A key element to understand complex systems is the relationship between the spatial scale of investigation and the structure of the interrelation among its elements. When it comes to economic systems, it is now well-known that the…

Physics and Society · Physics 2022-02-07 Dario Laudati , Manuel S. Mariani , Luciano Pietronero , Andrea Zaccaria

Economic growth results from countries' accumulation of organizational and technological capabilities. The Economic and Product Complexity Indices, introduced as an attempt to measure these capabilities from a country's basket of exported…

General Economics · Economics 2024-06-25 Carlo Bottai , Jacopo Di Iorio , Martina Iori

Poor economies not only produce less; they typically produce things that involve fewer inputs and fewer intermediate steps. Yet the supply chains of poor countries face more frequent disruptions---delivery failures, faulty parts, delays,…

General Finance · Quantitative Finance 2017-09-05 Charles D. Brummitt , Kenan Huremovic , Paolo Pin , Matthew H. Bonds , Fernando Vega-Redondo

Economic growth is often associated with diversification of economic activities. Making a product in a country is dependent on having, and acquiring, the capabilities needed to make the product, making the process path-dependent. We derive…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-09-05 Neave O'Clery , Muhammed A. Yildirim , Ricardo Hausmann

Contrary to conventional economic growth theory, which reduces a country's output to one aggregate variable (GDP), product diversity is central to economic development, as recent 'economic complexity' research suggests. A country's product…

Statistical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2023-05-09 Sabiou Inoua

Initially designed to predict and explain the economic trajectories of countries, cities, and regions, economic complexity has been found applicable in diverse contexts such as ecology and chess openings. The success of economic complexity…

Physics and Society · Physics 2024-05-08 Vito D. P. Servedio , Alessandro Bellina , Emanuele Calò , Giordano De Marzo

How much knowledge is there in an economy? In recent years, data on the mix of products that countries export has been used to construct measures of economic complexity that estimate the knowledge available in an economy and predict future…

Economics · Quantitative Finance 2017-07-26 Saleh Albeaik , Mary Kaltenberg , Mansour Alsaleh , Cesar A. Hidalgo

Despite the growing importance of the digital sector, research on economic complexity and its implications continues to rely mostly on administrative records, e.g. data on exports, patents, and employment, that have blind spots when it…

General Economics · Economics 2026-01-23 Sándor Juhász , Johannes Wachs , Jermain Kaminski , César A. Hidalgo

As the current thermo-industrial civilization expands, its technological and societal complexities increase. We suggest that physical power, economic activity and societal complexity are linked. A simple, intuitive model based on Systems…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-05-11 Jerome Lewandowski

This study investigates the economic complexity of Indian states by constructing a state-industry bipartite network using firm-level data on registered companies and their paid-up capital. We compute the Economic Complexity Index and apply…

General Economics · Economics 2026-01-21 Joel M Thomas , Abhijit Chakraborty

The evolution of economic and innovation systems at the national scale is shaped by a complex dynamics, the footprint of which is the nested structure of the activities in which different countries are competitive. Nestedness is a…

General Economics · Economics 2023-08-15 Aurelio Patelli , Lorenzo Napolitano , Giulio Cimini , Emanuele Pugliese , Andrea Gabrielli

Economic complexity - a group of dimensionality-reduction methods that apply network science to trade data - represented a paradigm shift in development economics towards materializing the once-intangible concept of capabilities as…

General Economics · Economics 2026-04-08 Ziang Huang , Huashan Chen

The world is changing at an ever-increasing pace. And it has changed in a much more fundamental way than one would think, primarily because it has become more connected and interdependent than in our entire history. Every new product, every…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-04-16 Dirk Helbing

Two network measures known as the Economic Complexity Index (ECI) and Product Complexity Index (PCI) have provided important insights into patterns of economic development. We show that the ECI and PCI are equivalent to a spectral…

Economics · Quantitative Finance 2021-10-05 Penny Mealy , J. Doyne Farmer , Alexander Teytelboym