Assessing Economic Complexity with Input-Output Based Measures

3. MEASURING CONNECTEDNESS AND COMPLEXITY WITH
OECD IO DATA

From the previous section, we end up with 12 measures of complexity as input-output
connectedness, listed in the table presented in Appendix 1.

In this section, we present the results of an empirical application of all these measures using
the Input-Output Tables of nine OECD economies in the early 1970s and early 1990s.

For the convenience of analysis, the original data is aggregated into the 17 sectors
presented in Appendix 2.

Tables 1 and 2 show the main results, i.e. the values of all the measures for all the
countries in the early 1970s and early 1990s.

INSERT TABLES 1 AND 2

A broad inspection of these values confirms the expected conclusions that the large
economies (Japan and USA) were in fact more complex, and that smaller economies tended
to be less complex (the Netherlands and Denmark), both in the 1970s and 1990s.

This can be clearly seen in Tables 3 and 4, where we present the rankings of countries for
each measure (9 points for the largest value, 1 point for the smallest) and the final ranking
based on all the measures (total number of points and relative position of each country).

INSERT TABLES 3 AND 4

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