The Atlas of Economic Complexity: Visualizing Global Economic Growth

Harvard's Center for International Development (CID) and the MIT Media Lab have joined forces to create The Atlas of Economic Complexity: Mapping Paths to Prosperity [mit.edu]. Next to a +85MB PDF file chockfull of brightly colored but insightful data visualizations, the project includes a website that holds a small collection of interactive visualizations. As a side note: the colors actually serve a purpose, each representing a product group (e.g. electronics, petrochemicals, fruit, oil, etc.).

The whole study is based on how many things countries make and how complex these things are. Based on historical benchmarking, this measure has proven to be highly predictive of growth in the future.

The introductory part of the report features a huge slopegraph (p.80) revealing rankings of 101 countries over more than 45 years. In addition, the historical evolution of a 'Product Space' network graph (p.45) is compared over several years (p.50-51). The most space is spent on showing a collection of detailed double-spread overviews of the economic situation of each of the countries, focused on various productivity metrics. Each overview features a Product Space network graph, revealing the dependency between different groups of products (through connecting edges), and their relevancy for that specific country (through highlighting the relevant nodes). A treemap then shows the size of the exports of each of the products (explained on p.95).

Data visualization experts might ravel in the fact each country's dashboard also features a set of 4-dimensional scatterplots (explained on p.94). The vertical axis shows the average complexity of the products versus the distance of the current situation, or the potential opportunity gain. Bubbles represent a community of products, of which the size is proportional to its global trade.

Via visualisiert and ABC.