Publications
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PDF Is Export a Probe for Domestic Production?
Recent works leverage export data to assess country production structure and ultimately country relative competitiveness. These works mostly rely only… Show more on the exported part of the total country output for reasons of data availability, homogeneity, and quality. Here we use the World Input-Output Database (WIOD), which offers cross-country harmonized data that accounts both for domestic production and export, to investigate to what extent export is a proxy for domestic production. We find that export mirrors remarkably well domestic production for manufacturing sectors or sectors related to physical goods. Conversely, this relation fades away for service related sectors. We found those relations consistently across most of the 40 countries for which data are available. Show less
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PDF The new paradigm of economic complexity
Economic complexity offers a potentially powerful paradigm to understand key societal issues and challenges of our time. The underlying idea… Show more is that growth, development, technological change, income inequality, spatial disparities, and resilience are the visible outcomes of hidden systemic interactions. The study of economic complexity seeks to understand the structure of these interactions and how they shape various socioeconomic processes. This emerging field relies heavily on big data and machine learning techniques. This brief introduction to economic complexity has three aims. The first is to summarize key theoretical foundations and principles of economic complexity. The second is to briefly review the tools and metrics developed in the economic complexity literature that exploit information encoded in the structure of the economy to find new empirical patterns. The final aim is to highlight the insights from economic complexity to improve prediction and political decision-making. Institutions including the World Bank, the European Commission, the World Economic Forum, the OECD, and a range of national and regional organizations have begun to embrace the principles of economic complexity and its analytical framework. We discuss policy implications of this field, in particular the usefulness of building recommendation systems for major public investment decisions in a complex world. Show less
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PDF Economic Complexity for competitiveness and innovation: a novel bottom-up strategy linking global and regional capacities
EU manufacturing has lost ground due to the low growth of the EU domestic economy and its diminished participation in… Show more global manufacturing value chains. EU industry is facing different transitions at the same time, including the digital transformation and the transition towards a net zero emission and circular economy. Developing technologies, products and solutions for this while having access to finance, resources and human capital equipped with the right skills are amongst the huge challenges to be overcome in the next decade. This implies the need for new business models and actors to ensure future competitiveness and employment. These competitive pressures challenge the EU as leading innovator in the world, which in turn is crucial for future industrial competitiveness. From the policy side, a more integrated approach to industrial, innovation and regional policies is necessary to trigger successful industrial transformation. In this environment, conventional economic analyses have shown limited usefulness. Indeed, Complex System analysis has highlighted since the '80s the limitation of conventional economic analyses to identify hidden trends in complex environments (Anderson, Arrow and Pines 1987). Economic Complexity is an alternative, non-conventional bottom-up and data-driven approach inspired by statistical physics and complex systems science. By producing quantitative, falsifiable results and relationships, it has great potential in the analysis of the current challenges in Innovation Systems. Show less
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PDF Economic complexity to address current challenges in innovation systems: A novel empirical strategy linked to the territorial dimension
Economic Complexity is a data driven empirical approach developed to inform the territorial development debate with quantitative metrics. In this framework,… Show more techniques inspired by complex systems analysis and network theory allow to measure the intangible capabilities necessary for a country or region to be competitive, both in absolute terms and in specific markets. This document addresses how different clogs of the innovation system co-evolve under complexity: both in terms of the different aspects (innovation, production, scientific activities) and geographical scales (countries, regions, cities) By using a number of techniques from the Economic Complexity toolbox, this document showcases examples of policy messages. Show less