Debate the Issues: Complexity and Policy making by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Finance and Investment/Governance/Economics
ISBN: 9789264271531
Publisher: / /OECD Publishing
Published: 2017-06-05T16:00:00+00:00

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The original article on OECD Insights, including links and supplementary material, can be found here: http://wp.me/p2v6oD-2AY

The full series can be found here: http://oecdinsights.org/?s=NAEC+complexity

Economic complexity, institutions and income inequality

by César Hidalgo and Dominik Hartmann, Macro Connections, The MIT Media Lab

Is a country’s ability to generate and distribute income determined by its productive structure? Decades ago Simon Kuznets proposed an inverted-u-shaped relationship describing the connection between a country’s average level of income and its level of income inequality. Kuznets’ curve suggested that income inequality would first rise and then fall as countries’ income moved from low to high. Yet, the curve has proven difficult to verify empirically. The inverted-u-shaped relationship fails to hold when several Latin American countries are removed from the sample, and in recent decades, the upward side of the Kuznets curve has vanished as inequality in many low-income countries has increased. Moreover, several East-Asian economies have grown from low to middle incomes while reducing income inequality.

Together, these findings undermine the empirical robustness of Kuznets’ curve, and indicate that GDP per capita is a measure of economic development that is insufficient to explain variations in income inequality. This agrees with recent work arguing that inequality depends not only on a country’s rate or stage of growth, but also on its type of growth and institutions. Hence, we should expect that more nuanced measures of economic development, such as those focused on the types of products a country exports, should provide information on the connection between economic development and inequality that transcends the limitations of aggregate output measures such as GDP.

Scholars have argued that income inequality depends on a variety of factors, from an economy’s factor endowments, geography, and institutions, to its historical trajectories, changes in technology, and returns to capital. The combination of these factors should be expressed in the mix of products that a country makes. For example, colonial economies that specialised in a narrow set of agricultural or mineral products tend to have more unequal distributions of political power, human capital, and wealth. Conversely, sophisticated products, like medical imaging devices or electronic components, are typically produced in diversified economies that require more inclusive institutions. Complex industries and complex economies thrive when workers are able to contribute their creative input to the activities of firms.

This suggests a model of heterogeneous industries in which firms survive only when they are able to adopt or discover the institutions and human capital that work best in that industry. According to this model, the composition of products that a country exports should tell us about a country’s institutions and about the quality of its human capital. This model would also suggest that a country’s mix of products should provide information that explains inequality and that might escape aggregate measures of development such as GDP, average years of schooling, or survey-based measures of formal and informal institutions.

With our colleagues from the MIT Media Lab, we used the Economic Complexity Index (ECI) to capture information about an economy’s level of development which is different from that captured in measures of income.

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