The Atlas of Economic Complexity
Romain Vuillemot  1@  
1 : Center of International Development at Harvard University  (Harvard CID)  -  Website
79 JFK Street 02138 Cambridge -  United States

The Atlas of Economic Complexity (http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/) is an online interactive tool that makes 60 years of trade publicly accessible in a user friendly way. It enables investors, entrepreneurs, policymakers, students and the general public to better understand the competitive landscape of countries around the globe. For any given country, one can visualize a country's total trade, track how these dynamics change over time and explore growth opportunities for more than a hundred countries worldwide. The Atlas runs on public data from the United Nations Comtrade dababase.

The Atlas can also answer predictive questions on countries growth opportunities adressed in its seminal book [1] using the product space visualization (http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore/tree_map/export/fra/all/show/2014/) which depicts a network of products. The arrangement of products in the Product Space is determined by how similar/dissimilar their knowledge requirements are; the Product Space shows when products are nearby. Using data on a given country's exports, The Atlas generates a product space for each country; a country-product space depicts what a country is currently able to make, which products are nearby and the country could feasibly begin to manufacture, and can consequently help determine paths of industrial expansion. 

The Atlas and its product spaces are used to train and suport polycymakers in designing structural policies in various developping regions of the globe [2] The Atlas has recently been adapted to Mexican (http://complejidad.datos.gob.mx/) and Colombian historical dataset using trade and social security data to explore and predict exports, industries and wages growth for those countries. All those Atlases (international and sub-national) are running with web technologies and their code is available online https://github.com/cid-harvard/ with a permissive licence.

[1] Hausmann R, Hidalgo CA, Bustos S, Coscia M, Simoes A, Yildirim MA. "The atlas of economic complexity: Mapping paths to prosperity". Mit Press; 2014 Jan 17.

[2] Israel Osorio Rodarte Hans Lofgren "A Product Space Perspective on Structural Change in Morocco" World Bank


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