Wealth of Nations

Just found an awesome resource (The Product Space and the Wealth of Nations) that tracks the economic health of nations using physics, biology and network analysis as research tools to determine how efficiently countries develop products for export, a key factor in finding out the value of any given country. In his article titled Milton Freeman, meet Richard Feyman, writer Tim Hartford describes how "Two physicists, Cesar Hidalgo and Albert-László Barabási, and two economists, Bailey Klinger and Ricardo Hausmann, have been drawing unusual pictures of economic "space" (on their site) that promise a deeper understanding of the biggest question in economics: why poor countries are poor."

When one visits the WON site, the different kind of visualizations used to build the WON model shows just how intense the research has been to enable these people to come up with a viable approach that really explains, in objective terms, why some nations cut it while others don't.

To see source information on WON, click on the Center for Complex Network Research
You won't be disappointed.