Summary

Maps capture data expressing the economic complexity of countries from Albania to Zimbabwe, offering current economic measures and as well as a guide to achieving prosperity

Why do some countries grow and others do not? The authors of The Atlas of Economic Complexity offer readers an explanation based on "Economic Complexity," a measure of a society's productive knowledge. Prosperous societies are those that have the knowledge to make a larger variety of more complex products. The Atlas of Economic Complexity attempts to measure the amount of productive knowledge countries hold and how they can move to accumulate more of it by making more complex products.

Through the graphical representation of the "Product Space," the authors are able to identify each country's "adjacent possible," or potential new products, making it easier to find paths to economic diversification and growth. In addition, they argue that a country's economic complexity and its position in the product space are better predictors of economic growth than many other well-known development indicators, including measures of competitiveness, governance, finance, and schooling.

Using innovative visualizations, the book locates each country in the product space, provides complexity and growth potential rankings for 128 countries, and offers individual country pages with detailed information about a country's current capabilities and its diversification options. The maps and visualizations included in the Atlas can be used to find more viable paths to greater productive knowledge and prosperity.

Choice Review

This atlas provides beautiful data visualizations illustrating the economic diversification of a range of countries worldwide, based on international trade data. The editors note several drawbacks to relying only on this data, but argue that it is the most reliable data set available. This atlas updates an earlier one (2011) with new material up to 2010, and with a new data set. It is divided into three parts: "What, Why and How?," "Complexity Rankings," and "Country Pages." The premise is that economic complexity is the key variable in understanding inequality. Hence, the way to development is simply to become more economically diverse. This reviewer sees this approach as hugely problematic, as it depoliticizes development, ignoring the power dynamics that have allowed wealthy nations to convert complex domestic economies into simple raw material exporters throughout the course of modern history. This volume should be used in conjunction with others such as Immanual Wallerstein's The Modern World-System (v. 1, 1976; v. 2, 1980, v. 3, 1989), among others; and Eric Wolf's Europe and the People without History (1982); or comparable examinations of the power dynamics that have created and maintain the disparities highlighted in the Atlas of Economic Complexity. Summing Up: Optional. Upper-level undergraduates and graduate students. A. Pashia Ingram Library, University of West Georgia