  For Adam Smith, wealth was related to the division of labor. As people and
firms specialize in different activities, economic efficiency increases,
suggesting that development is associated with an increase in the number of
individual activities and with the complexity that emerges from the
interactions between them. Here we develop a view of economic growth and
development that gives a central role to the complexity of a country's economy
by interpreting trade data as a bipartite network in which countries are
connected to the products they export, and show that it is possible to quantify
the complexity of a country's economy by characterizing the structure of this
network. Furthermore, we show that the measures of complexity we derive are
correlated with a country's level of income, and that deviations from this
relationship are predictive of future growth. This suggests that countries tend
to converge to the level of income dictated by the complexity of their
productive structures, indicating that development efforts should focus on
generating the conditions that would allow complexity to emerge in order to
generate sustained growth and prosperity.
