The Atlas of Economic Complexity
atlas.cid.harvard.edu
atlas.cid.harvard.edu
Fun fact: the tree map was done with vanilla WebGL2 completely from scratch (handwritten custom shaders, no ThreeJS or Babylon) for performance and I think it’s probably the fastest snd smoothest animating tree map you can find on the Internet.
Congratulations because the results are worth it.
> He's passionate about making beautiful, engaging and high-performance web applications
Yes, he surely is.
> Economic complexity expresses the diversity and sophistication of the productive capabilities embedded in the exports of each country [... ⇆] High complexity countries are home to a range of sophisticated, specialized capabilities and are therefore able to produce a highly diversified set of complex products. [...] Information about how many capabilities the country has is contained not only in the absolute number of products that it makes, but also in the ubiquity of those products (the number of countries that export the product) and in the sophistication and diversity of products those other countries make
Further details in the glossary, at https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/glossary
- 6. Czechia
- 9. Slovenia
- 11. Hungary
- 14. USA
Stats like these have a certain bias towards smaller countries where it's "easier" to concentrate high levels of complexity. If e.g. California was taken separately, it would likely rank very high. Japan's size and ranking make it look quite exceptional.
Edit: the top US state was New Hampshire https://oec.world/en/profile/subnational_usa_state/nh
By contrast, Japan, Switzerland and Czechia make basically a little bit of everything. (For different reasons, I think - Japan is obviously a large country, Switzerland's companies are in a lot of supply chains, and Czechia is centrally located in Europe, so it has specialized manufacturing for which you really only need one factory per continent, like cassette tapes.)
I'm guessing the overall US ratings are depressed by the dominance of some big sectors, like tech and housing?
Disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking about, I just read the definitions and have a newspaper subscription.
EDIT: Actually, you don't have to guess - the site's country profiles explain it pretty well:
https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/countries/59/new-products and https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/countries/231
"The USA's worsening complexity has been driven by a lack of diversification of exports."
CA, just in the Bay Area, has got 11% of world market cap with half of the top 15 public co's. These businesses are very sophisticated (practically no one in the world can replicate) and the rest of the economy is huge in many other areas like agriculture (half of US fruits / nuts, still exports internationally), film and media with Hollywood and Netflix, major ports to some of the world's most valuable trading partners (China and Japan), a top notch robust public university system (23 California State Universities and the 10 premier University of California's that lead the way in cutting research), and other RnD like Lawrence Livermore Lab, JPL, SpaceX, etc.
The index ranks the state lower than the rest of the country. I read the definition and I’m speculating why that is. You’re saying “yeah, well, we’re awesome.” Sure? The state is obviously very rich. A technical indicator is not destiny.
But you need to think about how the aussie economy is becoming dependent on these minerals, how much longer until some kind of revolution makes the world less dependent on lithium, and then your mines just lose a good chunk of value.
That's the problem with not having a higher economic complexity, you stop being able to pivot should the world scenario change.
There's at least some depth to the simplicity, they've survived more than one pivot already by being very effective resource extractors and comparatively very rich in resources.
As an Australian born engineer who works on cloud computing / ML infrastructure, I had to emigrate abroad to work in my field. Some days I ask if I should have skipped university and instead became an industrial electrician in the mines or something (would have made A LOT more money).
Very unusual economic environment that's for sure.
The Lucky Country (1964) Donald Horne
Horne's intent in writing the book was to portray Australia's climb to power and wealth based almost entirely on luck rather than the strength of its political or economic system, which Horne believed was "second rate".
In addition to political and economic weaknesses, he also lamented on the lack of innovation and ambition, as well as a philistinism in the absence of art, among the Australian population, viewed by Horne as being complacent and indifferent to intellectual matters.
He also commented on matters relating to Australian puritanism, as well as conservatism, particularly in relation to censorship and politics.
To be fair a lot of Australians were saying smilar things in the 1960s and note was taken.
That was the era of exodus to England and Aussies (Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries, Robert Hughes, Clive James, et al) making fun of their own country.
Australia is likely much better today for all that harsh self reflection (hopefully).
But I don't think its a hot take to suggest that readily available resource income has hampered the development of economic complexity over the years. It has also led to a significant amount of apathy in the population. Easy money corrupts.
I'm kind of a bullish on Australia's potential for tech innovation as I believe there is a tremendous amount of underutilized talent that's just itching for an opportunity to apply themselves.
Japan is #1. Since Japan exports few raw materials, the value of Japanese exports comes from adding complexity.
* the data is available and relatively standardized
* the export must be of a certain quality/price (otherwise other nations wouldn't buy it)
Tools like this atlas will increasingly be required to understand where policy changes might have most leverage.
It does not make sense to directly compare states of such different magnitutes as USA and Liechtenstein. Or given the highly integrated EU, it would make far more sense to compare the USA with the EU directly. Or regarding the complex economic situtation in Germany after the reunification, it would make more sense to compare Germany with USA+Mexico as a whole (West Germany to East Germany in 1990 in terms of population and GDP is aprox. USA to Mexico today -- of course, the time gap does not make it ideal, but it is playing with numbers anyway). Then there are countries whose export economy is dominated by just a few regions while other, typically small states are quite uniform.[1]
As far as I can see, the Atlas does not use the domestic economy at all for its complexity model. It would also be hard to compare objectively, because money might not be the best benchmark for this (for example, cheap health protection is typically better than expensive disease treatment). From anecdotal observations, I would argue that a lot of complexity growth in Germany in the last two decades occured in domestic services, such as child care and care for the elderly.
My final objection is that the measurement of complexity might depend on the exact division of sectors. The Atlas destinguishes between "motor vehicles for transporting goods" and "cars". But why stop there? Why not further subdivide "cars" into "microcars", "city cars", "small family car", "large family cars", "compact executive cars", "executive cars", "luxury cars", "sports cars", "leisure activity vehicle", ...? Only then can one see that the German car industry, for example, is much more diversified than many other car industries. But it would also automatically increase the overall complexity rating of Germany. In contrast, a further subdivision of sections in which Germany is weak (e.g. in tourism) would automatically lead to Germany losing complexity in comparison.
I think that only a holistic approach can lead to a reasonable evaluation of the economic situation of a country. The data provided by the Atlas may contribute to this, but the derivation of a "future dynamic" with a growth rate accuracy in the per mille range is just something like astrology in disguise.
[1] Here are, for example, the latest figures for Germany (preliminary for 2022): https://www.statistik-bw.de/HandelDienstl/Aussenhandel/AH-XP... (in German). The data shows the still very large gap between West and East Germany: only the per capita export of Saxony (Sachsen) with 36.0% is above the German average (according to the "country sum" (Ländervergleich) in the table); Berlin is the worst of all with only 9.1%.