Researchers Map Building Blocks of Economic Complexity
Tuesday, June 23, 2009 - 18:21
in Mathematics & Economics
(PhysOrg.com) -- Since the times of Adam Smith, economists have had the intuition that prosperity emerges from the division of labor, that is, from the interaction of thousands of individual activities. This idea has been present for a long time in economic theory but has been never been measured empirically. In this week`s edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), Ricardo Hausmann, director of Harvard`s Center for International Development (CID) and César A. Hidalgo, a research fellow at the Center, show how to measure the complexity of a country`s economy by applying a new method of Network Science.