Handbook of Economic Complexity for Policy

This handbook collects JRC’s six years of experience on economic complexity for policy. It is a tool for practitioners who aim at understanding the methods of complexity from data collection to policy recommendations. After introducing the reader to this innovative unconventional approach, the volume articulates methods and analysis in three parts. First: data. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 describe the datasets that are most commonly used for economic complexity analysis, with a deep dive in trade, patents, and scientific publications, which have played a greater role in JRC’s research. Second: methods. This second part shows how to use the available data for analysis. Most notably, it describes in great detail how to compute fitness and complexity indices, as well as relatedness metrics. Third: policy. The final part of this handbook collects policy work - mainly from the JRC - to show how the methods can be put into practice.