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THE ATLAS OF ECONOMIC COMPLEXITY: MAPPING PATHS TO PROSPERITY by Ricardo Hausmann, Cesar Hidalgo, Sebastian Bustos, Michele Coscia, Sarah Chung, Juan Jimenez, Alexander Simoes, and Muhammed Yildirim Harvard Center for International Development, 201 1, 362 pp. ISBN: 9780615546629
This book is both a research report of a new methodology for measuring strengths of national economies as well as an atlas that reports economic information for countries. I love this book! It is a great combination of breakthrough mathematics and effective communication. Even though I do not follow economic modeling, I am amazed by the insights provided by this complexity model and the clarity provided by the visualizations of the models and data.
The economic complexity metric is both informative and useful in that "The Atlas of Economic Complexity attempts to measure the amount of productive knowledge that each country holds", (p. ii) The basic assumptions of the model are that "prosperous modern societies are wiser, not because their citizens are individually brilliant, but because these societies hold a diversity of knowhow and because they are able to recombine...