Economic complexity and global trade flows

This dissertation explores the structure and dynamics of international trade flows, combining empirical and computational analysis with theoretical modeling. The first part focuses on analyzing import-export data to develop quantitative indicators of production efficiency and specialization patterns, drawing inspiration especially from physics and information theory. The second part extends this analysis to the structure of global value chains, with the goal of inferring their properties from trade data. As a potential extension, the work considers the microfoundation of models of observed production networks using tools from network theory, branching processes and dynamic programming. Together, these approaches aim to generalize and deepen the underlying mechanisms of such models, offering new insights into how agents navigate complex input-output networks in the global economy.