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emailMonday, October 20, 2008
Economic Complexity and Growth
Economic Complexity and Growth
Cesar Hidalgo, Harvard University (see www.chidalgo.com)
We develop a new general tool to capture the information contained in the links of a bipartite network and apply it to the relationship between countries and the products they export. The method is based on the calculation of the average properties of a node's neighbors, where the neighbors of a country are the products that it exports and the neighbors of a product are the countries that export it. We show that our measures are highly correlated with a country's GDP per capita. More importantly, we show that these measures are predictive of a country's future economic growth and of some of the properties of the new exports that a country will develop over time. This method can be iterated by successively calculating the average nearest neighbor properties of the previous measure. Surprisingly, the information on income and growth extracted through our method increases with each iteration, indicating that our approach captures information about the productive structure of countries that matters for economic growth and development.
- Location:Fainsod Room (Littauer 324)
- Date:Monday, October 20, 2008
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Time:12:00 PM
