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An Overview of the New Frontiers of Economic Complexity

Conference paper
Part of the New Economic Windows book series (NEW)

Abstract

The fundamental idea developed throughout this short overview on Economic Complexity is that a revolution of the revolution of Economics is needed to turn this field into a mature discipline. The first revolution of Economic Complexity (Bouchaud in Nature 455:1181, 2008) led to a conceptual paradigm shift and agent-based models have shown, from a qualitative point of view, the crucial role played by concepts like agent heterogeneity and herding behavior to understand the non-trivial features of financial time series. The second revolution must lead the paradigm shift from a conceptual and qualitative level to a quantitative and effective description of economic systems. This can be achieved through the introduction of new metrics and quantitative methods in Social Sciences (Economics, Finance, opinion dynamics, etc.). In fact, the concept of metrics is usually neglected by mainstream theories of Economy and Finance. Only in that way Economic Complexity can concretely affect the thinking of Economic mainstream and, in this sense, become a mature discipline. The large availability of datasets (the so-called Big Data Science) has recently revealed new promising path towards such perspectives and, as an example, we briefly discuss how archival data about export flows can be turned into a concrete tool to assess the competitiveness of countries and the complexity of products.

Keywords

Financial Market Systemic Risk Stylize Fact Financial Time Series Economic Mainstream 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Notes

Acknowledgements

This work is support by Italian PNR project CRISIS-Lab.

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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.ISC-CNRSapienza UniversityRomeItaly
  2. 2.Sapienza UniversityRomeItaly
  3. 3.ISC-CNRRomeItaly

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