8 - 12 July 2024

Economic Fitness & Complexity

summer ScHOOL 2024
Second edition

UNU-MERIT (Maastricht, the Netherlands)

A five-day Summer school on economic fitness and complexity for phd students, early career researchers, and practitioners

Organised by UNU-MERIT (Maastricht), Enrico Fermi Research Centre (CREF, Rome), and the Young Scholar Initiative (YSI-INET)

Call for applications 2024

An extensive introduction to the economic complexity framework, with theoretical and practical classes, and presentations of state-of-art applications of economic complexity methods in different areas of social sciences

TOPICS

Using complexity analysis for...

Economic Development and Growth

Predicting trajectories of economic development, relying on various sources of data, from co-locations to machine-learning approaches

Economic Geography and Labour

Studying local labour markets, labour flows, skill relatedness, job complexity and geographical patterns of inequality and resilience

Firm Dynamics

Mapping firm capabilities, creating new indicators of relatedness and diversification for understanding firm dynamics

Policy

Informing policy: an overview of the applications at the European Commission and at the World Bank Group

Sustainability

Identifying new pathways to a fair and just sustainability transition: the geography of green competitiveness, inequality, green technologies and policies

Science and Innovation

Understanding micro and macro patterns of co-evolution of science and technology to provide insights on the national, regional and local innovation systems

oVERVIEW

Courses and labs

The first three days of the school will focus on theoretical and practical classes covering the following topics: economic complexity measurement, network theory, machine learning, measurement of relatedness. Theoretical lectures will be followed by coding labs, where participants will apply the methodologies introduced in class to carry on assigned group projects.

PRESENTATIONS

In the last two days of the school, many world-wide renowned scholars have been invited to present their frontier research, linking economic complexity with economic development, economic geography, labour economics, sustainability, economics of science, and innovation policy. At the end of the school, students will also get a chance to present their group projects, and to get feedback on them.