[gov3009-l] Hidalgo on "The Structure of Economic Complexity"

Hi all, We hope you can join us for the Applied Statistics Workshop of the year this Wednesday, September 22nd, when we will be happy to have César A. Hidalgo presenting a paper entitled "The Structure of Economic Complexity." César is an Assistant Professor at the MIT Media Lab, where he leads the Macro Connections group, and a faculty associate at Harvard University’s Center for International Development Details of his talk and an abstract are below. The workshop begins at 12 noon and we will serve a light lunch. Hope to see you there! "The Structure of Economic Complexity" César A. Hidalgo Assistant Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) September 22nd, 2010, 12 noon K354 CGIS Knafel (1737 Cambridge St) Abstract: With billions or products, billions of people, and trillions of interactions, the world economy is one of the most outstanding complex systems to have ever emerged. Can we use complexity science to improve our understanding of a system of such paramount complexity? In this talk I summarize recent research that uses networks to describe, characterize and understand differences in the productive structure of nations and their evolution. First, I show how the complexity of an economy can be quantified by looking at the structure of the network connecting countries to the products they export and that countries tend to approach a level of income which is dictated by the complexity of their economies. Then, I show how development is constrained by a projection of this network into the space of products, or Product Space, by demonstrating empirically that the evolution of countries comparative advantage is constrained by the structure of this network. To conclude I present a simple model that can account for some of the stylized facts that we uncover from our analysis and discuss how strategy and policy can be reinterpreted from this alternative perspective. Cheers, matt. ~~~~~~~~~~~ Matthew Blackwell PhD Candidate Institute for Quantitative Social Science Department of Government Harvard University url: http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~blackwel/