New Metrics for Economic Complexity: Measuring th Intangible Growth Pontential of Countries

In this paper we provide a summary and a guide to the literature for a new line of research which goes under the name of Economic Complexity and is partly performed in collaboration with INET. This line of research portrays economic growth as an evolutive process of ecosystems of technologies and industrial capabilities. Complex systems analysis, simulation, systems science methods,and big data capabilities offer new opportunities to empirically map technology and capability ecosystems of countries and industrial sectors, analyse their structure,understand their dynamics and measure economic complexity. This approach provides a new perspective for data - driven fundamental economics in a strongly connected, globalised world. In particular here we discuss how it is possible to assess the competitiveness of country and complexity of products starting from the archival data on export flows that is the COMTRADE dataset which provides the matrix of countries and their exported products. According to the standard economic theory the specialization of countries towards certain specific products should be optimal. The observed data show that this is not the case and that diversification is actually more important. Specialization may be the leading effect in a static situation but the strongly dynamic and globalized world market suggests instead that flexibility and adaptability are essential elements of competitiveness as in bio-systems.