arXiv subjects

Flavio L. Pinheiro

Publications and source records attributed to Flavio L. Pinheiro.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2022

Economic complexity and inequality at the national and regional level

Recent studies have found evidence of a negative association between economic complexity and inequality at the country level. Moreover, evidence suggests that sophisticated economies tend to outsource products that are less desirable (e.g. in terms of wage and inequality effects), and instead focus on complex products requiring networks of skilled labor and more inclusive institutions. Yet the negative association between economic complexity and inequality on a coarse scale could hide important dynamics at a fine-grained level. Complex economic activities are difficult to develop and tend to concentrate spatially, leading to 'winner-take-most' effects that spur regional inequality in countries. Large, complex cities tend to attract both high- and low-skills activities and workers, and are also associated with higher levels of hierarchies, competition, and skill premiums. As a result, the association between complexity and inequality reverses at regional scales; in other words, more complex regions tend to be more unequal. Ideas from polarization theories, institutional changes, and urban scaling literature can help to understand this paradox, while new methods from economic complexity and relatedness can help identify inclusive growth constraints and opportunities.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2021

Comparing cars with apples? Identifying the appropriate benchmark countries for relative ecological pollution rankings and international learning

Research in Data Envelopment Analysis has created rankings of the ecological efficiency of countries' economies. At the same time, research in economic complexity has provided new methods to depict productive structures and has analyzed how economic diversification and sophistication affect environmental pollution indicators. However, no research so far has compared the ecological efficiency of countries with similar productive structures and levels of economic complexity, combining the strengths of both approaches. In this article, we use data on 774 different types of exports, CO2 emissions, and the ecological footprint of 99 countries to create a relative ecological pollution ranking (REPR). Moreover, we use methods from network science to reveal a benchmark network of the best learning partners based on country pairs with a large extent of export similarity, yet significant differences in pollution values. This is important because it helps to reveal adequate benchmark countries for efficiency improvements and cleaner production, considering that countries may specialize in substantially different types of economic activities. Finally, the article (i) illustrates large efficiency improvements within current global output levels, (ii) helps to identify countries that can best learn from each other, and (iii) improves the information base in international negotiations for the sake of a clean global production system.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2020

Computational Aspects of Optimal Strategic Network Diffusion

Diffusion on complex networks is often modeled as a stochastic process. Yet, recent work on strategic diffusion emphasizes the decision power of agents and treats diffusion as a strategic problem. Here we study the computational aspects of strategic diffusion, i.e., finding the optimal sequence of nodes to activate a network in the minimum time. We prove that finding an optimal solution to this problem is NP-complete in a general case. To overcome this computational difficulty, we present an algorithm to compute an optimal solution based on a dynamic programming technique. We also show that the problem is fixed parameter-tractable when parametrized by the product of the treewidth and maximum degree. We analyze the possibility of developing an efficient approximation algorithm and show that two heuristic algorithms proposed so far cannot have better than a logarithmic approximation guarantee. Finally, we prove that the problem does not admit better than a logarithmic approximation, unless P=NP.

cs.CC↗

arXiv2018

Optimal diversification strategies in the networks of related products and of related research areas

Countries and cities are likely to enter economic activities that are related to those that are already present in them. Yet, while these path dependencies are universally acknowledged, we lack an understanding of the diversification strategies that can optimally balance the development of related and unrelated activities. Here, we develop algorithms to identify the activities that are optimal to target at each time step. We find that the strategies that minimize the total time needed to diversify an economy target highly connected activities during a narrow and specific time window. We compare the strategies suggested by our model with the strategies followed by countries in the diversification of their exports and research activities, finding that countries follow strategies that are close to the ones suggested by the model. These findings add to our understanding of economic diversification and also to our general understanding of diffusion in networks.

physics.soc-ph↗