#economic complexity

Countries Ranked by Their Economic Complexity – Visual Capitalist

A breakdown of which factors that comprise economic complexity, and which global economies rank the highest. — Read on www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-ranked-by-their-economic-complexity/

Why do some countries grow and others do not? The authors of The Atlas of Economic Complexity offer readers an explanation based on "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. The Atlas of Economic Complexity attempts to measure the amount of productive knowledge countries hold and how they can move to accumulate more of it by making more complex products.

Talking about new world powers and trends for the future, I propose you to have a deeper look at economic complexity. 

When we want to study the relationship between knowledge and power, we should go beyond the traditional measurements of knowledge– PhD, patents etc. The amount of knowledge is not the one that impacts the most the power of a state. To be useful, the knowledge must be combined in a coherent way so that a country can take maximum advantage of its use. Moreover, the more diverse, but coherent and useful is the combination of knowledge in a given country, the bigger the chance is for it to produce a new, less ubiquous product. A country must have the ability to develop complex and rare products which will procure it with significant influence. 

When a country is innovative, in other words when it produces new, complex and less ubiquous products, its GDP grows much faster. Developing complex economy is a long and continuous process which influences trends in development - by observing the development of complex economy in the last 40 years, it is possible to forecast the further development of a country. Except the link between GDP and complex economy, it is important to have a look at the fact that countries which were among the first to develop complex products are not the ones which have better chances to keep there position in the future. The authors of the Atlas of economic complexity insist on the fact that countries which have invested their efforts in developing complex products, demanding similar combinations of knowledge have better chance to be the future leaders in the world's economy.

The economic complexity measurements have some limits - they focus on export of products by country and do not include services and products which are not exportable. But its strength is that it shows trends and remains a dynamic measurement of the use of knowledge for gaining economic and political advantage.  

Found on Alan Moore's blog SMLXL: "We have arrived at the edge of the adaptive range of our industrial world. At the edge, because that world, our world is being overwhelmed by a trilemma of social, organisational and economic complexity. We are in transit from a linear world to a non-linear one. Non-linear because it is for all of us socially, organisationally and economically ambiguous, confusing and worrying.

Productive knowledge, therefore, cannot be learned easily like a song or a poem. It requires structural changes. Just like learning a language requires changes in the structure of the brain, developing a new industry requires changes in the patterns of interaction inside an organization or society.

p.5