Product complexity and economic development

Jesus Felipe (), Utsav Kumar, Arnelyn Abdon and Marife Bacate

Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, 2012, vol. 23, issue 1, 36-68

Abstract: Development is a process of transforming a country's economic structure towards the production and export of more complex products. We use Hidalgo and Hausmann's (2009) method of reflections to compute measures of product and country complexity, and rank 5107 products and 124 countries. We find that: (i) the most complex products are in machinery, chemicals, and metals, while the least complex products are raw materials and commodities, wood, textiles, and agricultural products; (ii) the most complex economies in the world are Japan, Germany, and Sweden, and the least complex, Cambodia, Papua New Guinea, and Nigeria; (iii) the major exporters of the more complex products are the high-income countries, while the major exporters of the less complex products are the low-income countries; and (iv) export shares of the more complex products increase with income, while export shares of the less complex products decrease with income.

Keywords: Capabilities; Economic complexity; Diversification; Product complexity; Ubiquity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O10 O14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (137)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0954349X11000567
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Product Complexity and Economic Development (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:streco:v:23:y:2012:i:1:p:36-68

DOI: 10.1016/j.strueco.2011.08.003

Access Statistics for this article

Structural Change and Economic Dynamics is currently edited by F. Duchin, H. Hagemann, M. Landesmann, R. Scazzieri, A. Steenge and B. Verspagen

More articles in Structural Change and Economic Dynamics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().