Jorge Valvedere is a PhD fellow at UNU-MERIT. His research project Essays on Economic Complexity, Trade in Global Value Chains and Minerals Economics deepens on economic complexity literature and builds bridges between this literature strand and international economics and minerals economics. In this regard, it contributes to the literature by doing a rigorous analysis of the conceptual and methodological basis of economic complexity but, at the same time, proposing new interpretations, methods and avenues to apply economic complexity techniques.
The research project consists of four chapters. The first chapter is a conceptual and empirical revision of the economic complexity literature from where emerges important gaps. In addition, I develop a new methodology to estimate products and countries' complexity to fill some of these gaps, and I compare its results with the mainstream algorithms. The second chapter addresses two other gaps found in the first chapter, which is the employment of gross exports for estimating complexity and linking complexity to capabilities without considering that capabilities evolve slowly. Here I develop a sectoral complexity index that accounts exclusively for the domestic value-added contained in exports and estimates local capabilities (deep complexity) as the persistent fraction of the complexity series. The third chapter develops an empirical model that identifies a positive effect of the complexity of production on the vertical specialization of the global value chains (GVCs). In this regard, it proposes a novel definition of complexity by integrating and adapting the definitions of trade-in-tasks models and product-space literature. The fourth chapter introduces a novel theoretical and empirical framework for estimating the criticality of key minerals that are intensively used in the energy transition and the mining competitiveness of countries producing them, using economic complexity techniques.
