From Products to Capabilities: Constructing a Genotypic Product Space

Economic development is a path-dependent process in which countries accumulate capabilities that allow them to move into more complex products and industries. Inspired by a theory of capabilities that explains which countries produce which products, these diversification dynamics have been studied in great detail in the literature on economic complexity analysis. However, so far, these capabilities have remained latent and inference is drawn from product spaces that reflect economic outcomes: which products are often exported in tandem. Borrowing a metaphor from biology, such analysis remains phenotypic in nature. In this paper we develop a methodology that allows economic complexity analysis to use capabilities directly. To do so, we interpret the capability requirements of industries as a genetic code that shows how capabilities map onto products. We apply this framework to construct a genotypic product space and to infer countries’ capability bases. These constructs can be used to determine which capabilities a country would still need to acquire if it were to diversify into a given industry. We show that this information is not just valuable in predicting future diversification paths and to advance our understanding of economic development, but also to design more concrete policy interventions that go beyond targeting products by identifying the underlying capability requirements.