  Evaluating the economies of countries and their relations with products in
the global market is a central problem in economics, with far-reaching
implications to our theoretical understanding of the international trade as
well as to practical applications, such as policy making and financial
investment planning. The recent Economic Complexity approach aims to quantify
the competitiveness of countries and the quality of the exported products based
on the empirical observation that the most competitive countries have
diversified exports, whereas developing countries only export few low quality
products -- typically those exported by many other countries. Two different
metrics, Fitness-Complexity and the Method of Reflections, have been proposed
to measure country and product score in the Economic Complexity framework. We
use international trade data and a recent ranking evaluation measure to
quantitatively compare the ability of the two metrics to rank countries and
products according to their importance in the network. The results show that
the Fitness-Complexity metric outperforms the Method of Reflections in both the
ranking of products and the ranking of countries. We also investigate a
Generalization of the Fitness-Complexity metric and show that it can produce
improved rankings provided that the input data are reliable.
