Apps for Economic Development

Understanding the evolution of countries' productive structures requires detailed knowledge on the mix of products that countries make, and on how this evolves. The apps in this interactive feature are part of The Economic Complexity Observatory, an effort by the MIT Media Lab's Macro Connections group that focuses on the creation of interactive applications that can help make sense of the evolution of countries' economies.

Data

The applications in this interactive feature use international trade data in the Standard International Trade Classification (SITC) rev 2 at the 4 digit level of resolution. For the 1962-2000 period we use data compiled by Feenstra et al. (2005). For the 2001-2009 period we use data from the UN COMTRADE database.

Apps Created by

Macro Connections group at the MIT Media Lab, in collaboration with Harvard's Center for International Development.
Observatory Team: César A. Hidalgo, Anurag Kashyap, Isabel Meirelles, Alexander Simoes

macroconnections.media.mit.edu

The Product Space

1. Saturated Nodes

These are the products for which country exports more than its expected share (Revealed Comparative Advantage >1).

2. Pale Nodes

These are the products for which country exports less than its expected share (Revealed Comparative Advantage <1).

3. Clustering

Clusters in the product space emerge naturally from the observed co-export patterns. Countries are significantly more likely to become competitive at exporting goods that are adjacent in the product space to the ones that they already export. This makes the structure of the product space predictive of the set of products that a country will export in the future.

Treemaps

A treemap is a hierarchical data visualization that uses rectangles in place of the traditional tree structure. The structure is the same for both Export and Import Treemaps.

1. The Area

The area of each rectangle represents the Export or Import Shares for that country in a given year.

2. Clustering

Products are grouped by the Leamear system and visually categorized by different colors.

3. Opacity

The boldness or opacity of each rectangle's color corresponds to the Revealed Comparative Advantage or RCA of that particular product for the given country and year.

Mouse Over Key

On mouse over you will see detailed information on that product, including:

• Export/Import Value: nominal USD for that year
• Export/Import Share: as a percentage of the total Import/Export amount of that country in that year
• RCA - Revealed Compared Advantage