Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T01:22:23.560Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Exploring the Link Between Economic Complexity and Emergent Economic Activities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Alex Bishop  and
Juan Mateos-Garcia
Alex Bishop
Affiliation:
Nesta
Juan Mateos-Garcia*
Affiliation:
Nesta
*
E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Recent studies have shown a strong link between the complexity of economies and their economic development. There remain gaps in our understanding of the mechanisms underpinning these links, in part because they are difficult to analyse with highly aggregated, official data sources that do not capture the emergence of new industrial activities, a potential benefit from complexity. We seek to address some of these gaps by calculating two indices of economic complexity for functional local economies (Travel to Work Areas) in Great Britain, and explore their link with these locations’ economic performance. Seeking to gain a better understanding of the mechanism connecting economic complexity with economic performance, we create a measure of emergent technological activity in a location based on a combination of novel data sources including text from UK business websites and CrunchBase, a technology company directory, and study its link with economic complexity. Our results highlight the potential value of novel, unstructured data sources for the analysis of the links between economic complexity and regional economic development.

Keywords

complexityeconomic geographybig dataemergent technologiesR12O31
Type
Research Articles
Information
National Institute Economic Review , Volume 249 , August 2019 , pp. R47 - R58
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 National Institute of Economic and Social Research

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

An appendix to this article is available online.

References

Albeaik, S., Kaltenberg, M., Alsaleh, M. and Hidalgo, C.A. (2017), ‘Improving the Economic Complexity Index’, arXiv:1707.05826 [physics, q-n], July, http://arxiv.org/abs/1707.05826. arXiv:1707.05826.Google Scholar
Bakhshi, H. and Mateos-Garcia, J. (2016), ‘New data for innovation policy’, Working Paper, Nesta, London.Google Scholar
Balland, P.-A. and Rigby, D. (2017), ‘The geography of complex knowledge’, Economic Geography, 93(1), January, https://doi.org/10.1080/00130095.2016.1205947.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Breschi, S., Lassebie, J. and Menon, C. (2018), ‘A portrait of innovative start-ups across countries’.Google Scholar
Caldarelli, G., Cristelli, M., Gabrielli, A., Pietronero, L., Cala, A. and Tacchella, A. (2012), ‘A network analysis of countries export flows: firm grounds for the building blocks of the economy’, PLOS ONE, 7(10), pp.1–11, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0047278.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dalle, J.-M., den Besten, M. and Menon, C. (2017), ‘Using crunchbase for economic and managerial research’.Google Scholar
Delgado, M., Porter, M.E. and Stern, S. (2015), ‘Dening clusters of related industries’, Journal of Economic Geography, 16(1), pp. 1–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Einav, L. and Levin, J. (2014), ‘Economics in the age of big data’, Science, 346 (6210):1243089.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Frenken, K., Van Oort, F. and Verburg, T. (2007), ‘Related variety, unrelated variety and regional economic growth’, Regional Studies, 41(5):685–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gentzkow, M., Kelly, B.T. and Taddy, M. (2017), ‘Text as data’, Technical report, National Bureau of Economic Research.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gerlach, M., Peixoto, T.P. and Altmann, E.G. (2018), ‘A network approach to topic models’, Science Advances, 4(7), http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/7/eaaq1360.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hartmann, D., Guevara, M.R., Jara-Figueroa, C., Aristaran, M. and Hidalgo, C.A. (2017), ‘Linking economic complexity, institutions, and income inequality’, World Development, 93, pp. 75–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hidalgo, C.A., Balland, P.-A., Boschma, R., Delgado, M., Feldman, M., Frenken, K. and Zhu, S. (2017), ‘The principle of relatedness’.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hidalgo, C.A. and Hausmann, R. (2009), ‘The building blocks of economic complexity’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(26), pp. 10570–5, June, http://www.pnas.rg/content/106/26/10570.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hidalgo, C.A., Klinger, B., Barabasi, A.-L. and Hausmann, R. (2007), ‘The product space conditions the development of nations’, Science, 317(5837), pp. 482–7, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/317/5837/482.short.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Klinger, J., Mateos-Garcia, J. and Stathoulopoulos, K. (2018), ‘Deep learning, deep change? Mapping the development of the Articial Intelligence General Purpose Technology’, arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.06355.Google Scholar
Mateos-Garcia, J., Klinger, J. and Stathoulopoulos, K. (2018), Creative Nation: How the Creative Industries are Powering the UK's Nations and Regions, London: Nesta.Google Scholar
Mealy, P. and Coyle, D. (2019), ‘Greater Manchester economic prosperity review: economic complexity analysis’, Bennett Institute for Public Policy, University of Cambridge.Google Scholar
Mealy, P., Farmer, J.D. and Teytelboym, A. (2017), A New Interpretation of the Economic Complexity Index, arXiv:1711.08245 [q-n], http://arxiv.org/abs/1711.08245. arXiv: 1711.08245.Google Scholar
Nathan, M., Kemeny, T. and Almeer, B. (2017), ‘Using crunchbase to explore innovative ecosystems in the US and UK’.Google Scholar
Peixoto, T.P. (2017), ‘Bayesian stochastic blockmodeling’, abs/1705.10225, https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.10225.Google Scholar
Pugliese, E., Zaccaria, A. and Pietronero, L. (2016), ‘On the convergence of the fitness-complexity algorithm’, The European Physical Journal Special Topics, 225(10), pp. 1893–911, October, https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2015-50118-1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rotolo, D., Hicks, D. and Martin, B.R. (2015), ‘What is an emerging technology?’, Research Policy, 44(10), pp. 1827–43, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tacchella, A., Cristelli, M., Caldarelli, G., Gabrielli, A. and Pietronero, L. (2012), ‘A new metrics for countries’ fitness and products’ complexity’, Scientic Reports, 2:723.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed