The Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC) is a data visualization site for international trade data created by the Macro Connections group at the MIT Media Lab. The goal of the observatory is to distribute international trade data in a visual form. At present the observatory serves more than 20 million interactive visualizations, connecting hundreds of countries to their export destinations and to the products that they trade.
The Observatory of Economic Complexity combines a number of international trade data sets, including data from Feenstra, Lipset, Deng, Ma, and Mo's World Trade Flows: 1962-2000 dataset, [1] cleaned and made compatible through a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) project and HS4 aggregated from the HS6 classification cleaned by the BACI team at Centre d'Etudes Prospectives et d'Informations Internationales (CEPII). [2] The dataset contains exports and imports both by country of origin and by destination. Products are disaggregated according to the Standard International Trade Classification at the four-digit level (SITC-4) and the Harmonized System at the four digit level (HS-4).
Currently, data is available from 1962 through 2021.
Products, represented by rectangles, are drawn from the 775 individual product classes found in the Standardized International Trade Code at the four-digit level (SITC-4). The rectangle's color corresponds to the 34 product communities found in the Product Space and other visualizations from The Observatory of Economic Complexity. Product Exports Treemaps in The Observatory of Economic Complexity graphically represent product's share of a nation's trade (imports or exports). The larger the size of the rectangle, the larger the product's share of that country's imports or exports.
An example from Benin in 2009 is shown on the right.
Additional visual representations include
D3plus is the underlying engine responsible for generating all of the visualization used on the site. D3plus is an open source (MIT license) [4] JavaScript library built on top of D3.js by Alexander Simoes and Dave Landry. It is also used on other visualization themed sites such as DataViva and Pantheon.
The economy of Grenada is largely tourism-based, small, and open economy. Over the past two decades, the main thrust of Grenada's economy has shifted from agriculture to services, with tourism serving as the leading foreign currency earning sector. The country's principal export crops are the spices nutmeg and mace. Other crops for export include cocoa, citrus fruits, bananas, cloves, and cinnamon. Manufacturing industries in Grenada operate mostly on a small scale, including production of beverages and other foodstuffs, textiles, and the assembly of electronic components for export.
The economy of Israel is a highly developed free-market economy. The prosperity of Israel's advanced economy allows the country to have a sophisticated welfare state, a powerful modern military said to possess a nuclear-weapons capability with a full nuclear triad, modern infrastructure rivaling many Western countries, and a high-technology sector competitively on par with Silicon Valley. It has the second-largest number of startup companies in the world after the United States, and the third-largest number of NASDAQ-listed companies after the U.S. and China. American companies, such as Intel, Microsoft, and Apple, built their first overseas research and development facilities in Israel. More than 400 high-tech multi-national corporations, such as IBM, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Facebook and Motorola have opened R&D centers throughout the country.
The economy of Moldova is an emerging upper-middle income economy, with a high Human Development Index. Moldova is a landlocked Eastern European country, bordered by Ukraine on the East and Romania to the West. It is a former Soviet republic and today a candidate member to the European Union.
The economy of Romania is a high-income mixed economy. It has a highly complex economy, ranked 12th in the European Union by total nominal GDP and 7th largest when adjusted by purchasing power parity. The World Bank notes that Romania's efforts are focused on accelerating structural reforms and strengthening institutions in order to further converge with the European Union. The country's economic growth has been one of the highest in the EU since 2010, with 2022 seeing a better-than-expected 4.8% increase.
The Diamond industry of Israel is an important world player in producing cut diamonds for wholesale. In 2010, Israel became the chair of the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme. As of 2016, cut diamonds constituted 23.2% of Israel's total exports and they were the country's biggest export product, amounting to 12% of the world's production.
The Product Space is a network that formalizes the idea of relatedness between products traded in the global economy. The network first appeared in the July 2007 issue of Science in the article "The Product Space Conditions the Development of Nations," written by Cesar A. Hidalgo, Bailey Klinger, Ricardo Hausmann, and Albert-László Barabási. The Product Space network has considerable implications for economic policy, as its structure helps elucidate why some countries undergo steady economic growth while others become stagnant and are unable to develop. The concept has been further developed and extended by The Observatory of Economic Complexity, through visualizations such as the Product Exports Treemaps and new indexes such as the Economic Complexity Index (ECI), which have been condensed into the Atlas of Economic Complexity. From the new analytic tools developed, Hausmann, Hidalgo and their team have been able to elaborate predictions of future economic growth.
Comext is a statistical database on trade of goods managed by Eurostat, the Statistical Office of the European Commission. It is an important indicator of the performance of the European Union (EU) economy, because it focuses on the size and the evolution of imports and exports.
The World Integrated Trade Solution (WITS) is a trade software provided by the World Bank for users to query several international trade databases.
The Economic Complexity Index (ECI) is a holistic measure of the productive capabilities of large economic systems, usually cities, regions, or countries. In particular, the ECI looks to explain the knowledge accumulated in a population and that is expressed in the economic activities present in a city, country, or region. To achieve this goal, the ECI defines the knowledge available in a location, as the average knowledge of the activities present in it, and the knowledge of an activity as the average knowledge of the places where that economic activity is conducted. The product equivalent of the Economic Complexity Index is the Product Complexity Index or PCI.
The Atlas of Economic Complexity: Mapping Paths to Prosperity is a 2011 economics book by Ricardo Hausmann, Cesar A. Hidalgo, Sebastián Bustos, Michele Coscia, Sarah Chung, Juan Jimenez, Alexander Simoes and Muhammed A. Yıldırım. A revised 2014 edition is published by the MIT Press.
DataViva is an information visualization engine created by the Strategic Priorities Office of the government of Minas Gerais. DataViva makes official data about exports, industries, locations and occupations available for the entirety of Brazil through eight apps and more than 100 million possible visualizations.
César A. Hidalgo is a Chilean born, Chilean-Spanish-American physicist, author, and entrepreneur. He directs the Center for Collective Learning at the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Institute (ANITI) of the University of Toulouse. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Manchester, and is a visiting professor at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Hidalgo is known for work on Economic Complexity, Relatedness, Data Visualization, Applied Artificial Intelligence, and Digital Democracy. Prior to joining the University of Toulouse, Hidalgo was a professor at MIT where he directed the Collective Learning group. He is also a founder and partner at Datawheel, a data visualization and distribution company.
Robert Christopher Feenstra is an American economist, academic and author. He is the C. Bryan Cameron Distinguished Chair in International Economics at University of California, Davis. He served as the director of the International Trade and Investment Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research from 1992 to 2016. He also served as Associate Dean in the Social Sciences at the University of California, Davis from 2014 to 2019.
Greece–Portugal relations refer to bilateral relations between Greece and Portugal. The diplomatic relations between the two countries date back to 1835, following the independence of Greece. The Greek government sought to establish diplomatic relations with Portugal, and nominated the Count Andreas Metaxas as the first Greek Ambassador non-resident in Lisbon. On 29 May 1924, Portugal recognized, de jure and de facto, the Second Hellenic Republic,. It has kept diplomatic relations with Greece until the present day. Portugal and Greece maintain a strong diplomatic relationship, strengthened by the fact that both countries are present in multiple international organizations, such as the Council of Europe, European Union, NATO and the United Nations.