From June 9th to 13th, the Enrico Fermi Research Center (CREF) will host the third edition of the Economic Fitness and Complexity (EFC) Summer School. This year’s school is organized in collaboration with UNU-MERIT (Maastricht), UNU-CRIS (Bruges), and the Young Scholar Initiative of the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

Economic Fitness and Complexity is a multidisciplinary and data-driven approach, developed at CREF, that describes economies as evolutionary processes of interconnected ecosystems of industries, technologies, and infrastructures. EFC methods have shown greater accuracy in forecasting countries’ economic growth compared to traditional analyses, providing scholars and policymakers with a valuable tool for predicting economic diversification trajectories at national and regional levels.

EFC has gained increasing popularity across various social science disciplines, including economic development, evolutionary economics, economic geography, economics of science, and technological change.

The Economic Fitness and Complexity School was created to meet the needs of young scholars (postgraduate students, including Master’s and PhD candidates, and early-career researchers) and professionals who wish to integrate EFC methods into their research and work.

Following the format of previous editions held at CREF (2023) and UNU-MERIT in Maastricht (2024), the Summer School program will be divided into two parts. In the first part, participants will delve into the main tools of the “fitness toolbox”, including the economic fitness and complexity algorithm, relatedness measures, and network inference using random graphs and multilayer networks. The second part of the school will feature speakers presenting cutting-edge contributions from the fitness and complexity literature, covering topics such as economic development, technological and scientific production, sustainability, labor markets, and industrial policy.

Further details and the full program are available on the school’s website.