A network approach to rank countries chasing sustainable development.

In 2015, the United Nations established the Agenda 2030 for sustainable development, addressing the major challenges the world faces and introducing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). How are countries performing in their challenge toward sustainable development? We address this question by treating countries and Goals as a complex bipartite network. While network science has been used to unveil the interconnections among the Goals, it has been poorly exploited to rank countries for their achievements.

Reconciling contrasting views on economic complexity.

Summarising the complexity of a country's economy in a single number is the holy grail for scholars engaging in data-based economics. In a field where the Gross Domestic Product remains the preferred indicator for many, economic complexity measures, aiming at uncovering the productive knowledge of countries, have been stirring the pot in the past few years. The commonly used methodologies to measure economic complexity produce contrasting results, undermining their acceptance and applications.

Spatial Distribution of the International Food Prices: Unexpected Heterogeneity and Randomness.

Global food prices are typically analysed in a time-series framework. We complement this approach by focusing on the spatial price dispersion of the country-pair bilateral trade in the international food trade network (), for ten relevant commodities. The main purposes are to verify if the Law of One Price () holds and to investigate the emergence of randomness in the price-formation mechanism.

A change of perspective in network centrality.

Typing "Yesterday" into the search-bar of your browser provides a long list of websites with, in top places, a link to a video by The Beatles. The order your browser shows its search results is a notable example of the use of network centrality. Centrality measures the importance of the nodes in a network and it plays a crucial role in several fields, ranging from sociology to engineering, and from biology to economics.

Complex Economies Have a Lateral Escape from the Poverty Trap.

We analyze the decisive role played by the complexity of economic systems at the onset of the industrialization process of countries over the past 50 years. Our analysis of the input growth dynamics, considering a further dimension through a recently introduced measure of economic complexity, reveals that more differentiated and more complex economies face a lower barrier (in terms of GDP per capita) when starting the transition towards industrialization. As a consequence, we can extend the classical concept of a one-dimensional poverty trap, by introducing a two-dimensional poverty trap: a country will start the industrialization process if it is rich enough (as in neo-classical economic theories), complex enough (using this new dimension and laterally escaping from the poverty trap), or a linear combination of the two.