Research Seminar
Economic Complexity and beyond: harnessing the power of data to improve the value chain
This talk will show how to capture data expressing the economic complexity of countries from Albania to Zimbabwe, offering current economic measures and as well as a guide to achieving prosperity.
This talk will offer an exploration of " Economic Complexity," a measure of a society's productive knowledge. Prosperous societies are those that have the knowledge to make a larger variety of more complex products. How do we measure the amount of productive knowledge countries hold and how they can move to accumulate more of it by making more complex products?
Through the graphical representation of the" Product Space," we are able to identify each country's" adjacent possible," or potential new products, making it easier to find paths to economic diversification and growth.
In addition, they argue that a country's economic complexity and its position in the product space are better predictors of economic growth than many other well-known development indicators, including measures of competitiveness, governance, finance, and schooling.
The speaker
Alex Simoes, Co-founder @ DatawheelPersonal Homepage here
Discussant: David Kucera, Senior Researcher, Employment and Policy Department, ILO
Moderator: Sandra Yu, Technical Specialist, SME Enabling Environment, ILO
This research seminar was organised in collaboration with the Mainstreaming Employment into Trade and Investment (METI) project