Essays on economic complexity, international trade and minerals economics

This PhD thesis offers a critical and innovative contribution to the field of economic complexity by addressing its conceptual ambiguities, methodological limitations, and empirical challenges. Economic complexity, though widely cited, has lacked a clear definition, robust theoretical foundations, and appropriate data for measuring its core idea—local capabilities. The work engages with various strands of the literature, from complexity economics and trade theory to network analysis and global value chains, in order to redefine and operationalize economic complexity in a more coherent and meaningful way. In a nutshell, Chapter 2 identifies four main gaps of economic complexity literature and proposes a novel framework to rethink economic complexity. Chapter 3 digs into the gap related to the mismatch between the intuition of economic complexity as a proxy of local capabilities and the data employed for its estimation (gross export data). Chapter 4 incorporates a sectoral economic complexity index into a trade-in-task model, testing whether complexity affects vertical specialization across global value chains. Chapter 5 uses economic complexity techniques to estimate the criticality level of minerals and the competitiveness level of countries producing them.