Related papers: Across Time and (Product) Space: A Capability-Cent…
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…
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…
We provide a mechanistic foundation for economic complexity methods. In our model, an economy's ability to produce an activity depends on the joint presence of required capabilities. We analytically derive the Economic Complexity Index…
Economic complexity reflects the amount of knowledge that is embedded in the productive structure of an economy. It resides on the premise of hidden capabilities - fundamental endowments underlying the productive structure. In general,…
The Economic Complexity Index (ECI; Hidalgo & Hausmann, 2009) measures the complexity of national economies in terms of product groups. Analogously to ECI, a Patent Complexity Index (PatCI) can be developed on the basis of a matrix of…
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…
A country's mix of products predicts its subsequent pattern of diversification and economic growth. But does this product mix also predict income inequality? Here we combine methods from econometrics, network science, and economic…
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…
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…
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…
Recently we uploaded to the arxiv a paper entitled: Improving the Economic Complexity Index. There, we compared three metrics of the knowledge intensity of an economy, the original metric we published in 2009 (the Economic Complexity Index…
Economic complexity algorithms aim to uncover the hidden capabilities that drive economic systems. Here, we present a fundamental reinterpretation of two of these algorithms, the Economic Complexity Index (ECI) and the Economic Fitness and…
A recent paper by Hausmann and collaborators (1) reaches the important conclusion that Complexity-weighted diversification is the essential element to predict country growth. We like this result because Complexity-weighted diversification…
Economic complexity reflects the amount of knowledge that is embedded in the productive structure of an economy. By combining tools from network science and econometrics, a robust and stable relationship between a country's productive…
Economic Complexity (EC) methods have gained increasing popularity across fields and disciplines. In particular, the EC toolbox has proved particularly promising in the study of complex and interrelated phenomena, such as the transition…
In recent decades, trade between nations has constituted an important component of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with official estimates showing that it likely accounted for a quarter of total global production. While evidence of…
China has experienced an outstanding economic expansion during the past decades, however, literature on non-monetary metrics that reveal the status of China's regional economic development are still lacking. In this paper, we fill this gap…
Much of the analysis of economic growth has focused on the study of aggregate output. Here, we deviate from this tradition and look instead at the structure of output embodied in the network connecting countries to the products that they…
We build on the interpretation of the Economic Complexity method as Correspondence Analysis (CA), and propose that the Canonical form of CA (CCA), which originated in the ecology literature, can be used to calculate multi-dimensional…
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…