Economic Complexity refers to a new line of research which portrays economic growth as a process of evolution of ecosystems of technologies and industrial capabilities. This approach provides a new vision of a data driven fundamental economics in a strongly connected, globalised world.  According to the standard economic theory the specialization of countries towards certain specific products should be optimal. The observed data show that this is not the case and that diversification is actually more important. The situation is different for companies or sectors which seem instead to specialize only on few products.

We have introduced a new metrics for the Fitness of countries and the Complexity of products which is a sort of economic non-linear version of the Google Page rank approach. The direct comparison of the Fitness with the country GDP gives an assessment of the non-expressed potential of the country. This can be used as a predictor of GDP evolution and sectors performances. These results are also useful for risk analysis, planning of industrial development and strategies to exit from the “poverty trap”. The dynamics in the GDP-Fitness plane reveals a heterogeneous structure and certain areas behave in a laminar way (high predictability) while others appear turbulent (low predictability).