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Economic Data Viz Tool Helps Tell Trade Stories
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How to analyze the relationship between countries and products. Annie White and Tim Cheston with the Harvard Growth Lab’s Atlas of Economic Complexity explore the links between countries and what they produce. • by Erika Filter, National Press Foundation • When it comes to visualizing stories on global trade, sometimes journalists want to go beyond a shipping yard photo. The Atlas of Economic Complexity allows reporters to produce data visualizations showing any country’s trends in imports and exports for 6,000 products and services. Harvard Growth Lab’s director of software tools Annie White and the senior manager of applied research, Tim Cheston, explained to NPF International Trade Reporting fellows how to use the tool. • Using data from the UN’s Comtrade database, which collects nationally reported data semiannually, the Growth Lab adjusts the data to maximize reporting, making it possible to chart thousands of products and services, searchable by name or specific trade codes. The atlas also shows the growth of industries in individual countries over multiple years. • The Growth Lab also profiles each country, yielding a unique narrative that includes growth projections based on a country’s exports and can demonstrate a county’s market share in a given product. For example, China will have the fastest growth in income per capita in the next decade, according to these projections. • The atlas also helps journalists understand the relationship between the technology needed for certain products. • As the key to economic growth, Cheston delineates three main types of technology: • Embedded knowledge, is knowledge that is contained within an object. For instance, a person can fly a drone without knowing how to build the drone. “It’s embedded in the tool itself,” Cheston said. • Codified knowledge, comes through following how-to manuals. • Tacit knowledge comes from time spent perfecting a trade, like dentistry. It’s the hardest to disseminate. • Although industries are comprised of individuals, they are more than the sum of those players. Cheston suggests thinking of each part of an industry — a capability or piece of knowledge — like a Scrabble tile. As a country accumulates more tiles, it’ll be able to create more words — or reverting to the analogy, more industries. “And if you’re missing any of those letters, you’re not able to produce that complex industry itself,” Cheston said. • In the Growth Lab’s product space visualization, a country is more likely to produce goods that are related to another. “If a country produces men’s shirts, it likely also produces women’s pants,” Cheston said. But that doesn’t mean that country will produce heavy machinery, like cars. “So countries that produce textiles often require very different sets of technology, very different sets of know-how in order to produce machinery,” Cheston said. “So few textile-producing countries are able to leap into machinery.” • As countries expand, the Growth Lab measures the feasibility of a country producing other goods based on how they compare to what is already being produced and based on how complex the good is. • Economic complexity describes a country’s income per capita. “But it’s not just as useful as a static measure, it is really valuable because your complexity relative to your GDP today also predicts future growth,” Cheston said. The lab also ranks countries in terms of complexity. • “We provide four data visualizations to really get a sense of a country’s imports and exports sort of as a proxy for what’s going on in this country in terms of capability and know-how,” White said. “That sets us up to start to understand the complexity in the country and opportunity available to this country in terms of growth and diversification.” • Users can also download the data and images of the visualizations, which will specify what year the data is from. • Speakers: Annie White, Director, Software Tools, Harvard Growth Lab at Harvard Kennedy School • Tim Cheston, Senior Manager, Applied Research, Harvard Growth Lab at Harvard Kennedy School • Takeaways, transcript and resources: https://nationalpress.org/topic/atlas... • This fellowship is part of an ongoing program of journalism training and awards for trade coverage sponsored by the Hinrich Foundation. • This video was produced within the Evelyn Y. Davis studios. NPF is solely responsible for the content.
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