Economic Geography and Complexity Theory

The global economy operates as a complex system that allocates resources in a decentralized way across myriad agents. Over time, it exhibits an impressive rate of collective learning as evidenced by its growing productivity and the expanding variety of output it generates. However, growth, productivity and learning are not distributed equally across locations. On the contrary, wealth, opportunity, economic activity and innovation tend to all concentrate in a relatively small number of affluent places. Various strands of complexity Science have contributed to our understanding of these phenomena. However, they have done so in disconnected debates and communities. In this chapter, we use the framework of Economic Complexity to synthesize insights derived from three distinct literatures: urban scaling, evolutionary economic geography and global production networks. Economic complexity proposes that production requires access to capabilities, such that increasing the variety of economic production requires acquiring or accessing new capabilities. From this synthesis, we derive a research agenda that aims to understand how local economies develop, not only as individual units exploring their adjacent possible, but as parts of a system that allows local economies to mix their capabilities with those of distant counterparts by relying on the interplay of multinational corporations, global value chains and institutions to coordinate interactions at the local and global scale.