Assessing Economic Complexity in some OECD countries with Input-Output Based Measures

Economic complexity can be defined as the level of interdependence between the component parts of an economy. In input-output systems intersectoral connectedness is a crucial feature of analysis, and there are many different methods of measuring it. Most of the measures, however, have important drawbacks to be used as a good indicator of economic complexity, because they were not explicitly made with this purpose in mind. In this paper, we present, discuss and compare empirically different indexes of economic complexity as sectoral connectedness, using the inter-industry tables of several OECD countries.Financial support by FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia), Portugal is gratefully acknowledged. This paper is part of the Multi-annual Funding Project (POCTI/0436/2003