A New Metric for the Competitiveness of Countries and the Quality of Products

Abstract

In the previous chapter we have seen that there exist some evidences for a third intermediate layer in the network countries-products. This layer is substantially unobservable but contains all the information about the complexity, the competitiveness and the growth potentiality of a productive system. The ideal picture of a tripartite network in which a country is able to export a product only if it has the capabilities required by that product highlights that, even if shrunk, the projected bipartite network countries-products can be informative about the layer of capabilities. In fact from a suitable analysis of the basket of exported products the endowment of capabilities may be extracted or at least measured in a consistent way. In the previous chapter we have described the attempt presented in [1]. We have seen that while the results of this method are in agreement with the traditional monetary indicators, they fail to grasp the level of complexity of a country. Here we develop a new self-consistent method which defines a metric for country competitiveness (hereafter fitness) and one for product qualities. On one hand we find the metric for countries matches the known results given by monetary indicators, such as GDP and GDP per capita, but, differently from the method of reflections, we are able to show that in a toy model where the tripartite graph is assigned the fitnesses of countries are highly correlated with the basket of capabilities.