Economist Profile: Cesar Hidalgo

The work of Cesar Hidalgo is important in understanding the dynamics of economic growth in knowledge economies

He has been at the forefront of research into the economics of networks and complexity and their connections with how countries grow and reach new levels of prosperity.

According to Hidalgo, information is what makes the universe interesting, for example the products made by Apple and which help to make it the most profitable business in the world are essentially crystallised information.

Everything in our economy involves concoctions of physical order, and economies are nothing other than the distributed computers that compute that physical order

Making things is not easy, the products that we take for granted are not as trivial as we think. Most of us know how to use a tube of toothpaste or a pencil but few of us are able to produce them ourselves. Crystallised imagination allows us to live at high levels of prosperity.

Hidalgo has done some important work on the significance of networks in driving countries to higher levels of sustainable prosperity

Networks of people and networks of firms allow societies to expand rapidly their total computational knowledge and in open communities with high levels of trust, know-how is more widely diffused across related industries leading to increased economic complexity and ultimately higher living standards.

More recently the emphasis has been on labour, capital and information. The people have to know something. And the people also have to be able to work together. We need social capital as well.

Physical capital, human capital, intellectual capital and social capital are all needed.