- 8
- April
- 2025
CREF promotes original and high-impact lines of research, based on physical methods, but with a strong interdisciplinary character and in relation to the main problems of the modern knowledge society.
The CREF was born with a dual soul: a research centre and a historical museum. Its aim is to preserve and disseminate the memory of Enrico Fermi and to promote the dissemination and communication of scientific culture.
Higher education and projects for young researchers
Economic Complexity and Growth: A Perspective from New Structural Economics
Abstract: We introduce the Endogenous Structural Index (ESI), a novel metric for economic complexity that assesses a country’s capacity to produce complex products. The ESI enhances existing models by integrating the alignment of industrial structure with factor endowments structure, a critical aspect often overlooked due to the traditional assumption that no distortions exist in production so that Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) faithfully represents a country’s actual production capabilities for a product. We demonstrate that, in the absence of economic distortions, a country’s industrial structure shall be congruent with the optimal structure determined by its factor endowments and the varying factor intensities across industries, allowing the ESI to approximate well-known complexity indices such as the Economic Complexity Index and the Fitness Index. Through Monte Carlo simulations, we illustrate how the ESI captures the decline in an economy’s overall capacity due to mismatches between factor endowments and industrial structure. Finally, regression analyses reveal that the ESI performs particularly well in predicting economic growth, especially in non-OECD countries.
The speaker: Yumin Hu is Ph. D. Candidate in Economics, Peking University, China
• Thesis Advisor: Justin Yifu Lin and Mingzhi Jimmy Xu
• Research Interests: International trade, Urban economics, and Economic Geography
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