The Building Blocks of Economic Complexity
“As people and firms specialize in different activities, economic efficiency increases, suggesting that development is associated with an increase in the number of individual activities and with the complexity that emerges from the interactions between them…. [Our work shows] that the measures of complexity we derive are correlated with a country’s level of income, and that deviations from this relationship are predictive of future growth. This suggests that countries tend to converge to the level of income dictated by the complexity of their productive structures, indicating that development efforts should focus on generating the conditions that would allow complexity to emerge to generate sustained growth and prosperity.”
— César A. Hidalgo, and Ricardo Hausmann, “The Building Blocks of Economic Complexity, http://www.pnas.org/content/106/26/10570
