  Novel data has been leveraged to estimate socioeconomic status in a timely
manner, however, direct comparison on the use of social relations and talent
movements remains rare. In this letter, we estimate the regional economic
status based on the structural features of the two networks. One is the online
information flow network built on the following relations on social media, and
the other is the offline talent mobility network built on the anonymized resume
data of job seekers with higher education. We find that while the structural
features of both networks are relevant to economic status, the talent mobility
network in a relatively smaller size exhibits a stronger predictive power for
the gross domestic product (GDP). In particular, a composite index of
structural features can explain up to about 84% of the variance in GDP. The
result suggests future socioeconomic studies to pay more attention to the
cost-effective talent mobility data.
