This is a genuinely useful resource, thank you. I’ve not encountered the Atlas before in agricultural value chain work in West Africa, but hadn’t fully appreciated its potential as a cause prioritization tool. What strikes me is that the Economic Complexity Index makes visible something development discourse tends to obscure: the structural distance between where a country’s productive capacity sits and where it needs to go. That distance is a map of where institutional intervention has the highest leverage exactly the kind of analysis EA cause prioritization should engage with, but rarely does. The product space framework also reframes the core question: not “what intervention produces the best RCT result” but “what structural moves make the most other moves possible.” That is a more powerful question, and one that connects directly to climate adaptation, food systems, and AI governance in African contexts. If there’s a real research agenda here applying complexity economics to EA cause prioritization in Sub-Saharan Africa, identifying high-leverage structural interventions that the current EA portfolio underweights because they resist standard impact metrics.
This is a genuinely useful resource, thank you. I’ve not encountered the Atlas before in agricultural value chain work in West Africa, but hadn’t fully appreciated its potential as a cause prioritization tool.
What strikes me is that the Economic Complexity Index makes visible something development discourse tends to obscure: the structural distance between where a country’s productive capacity sits and where it needs to go. That distance is a map of where institutional intervention has the highest leverage exactly the kind of analysis EA cause prioritization should engage with, but rarely does.
The product space framework also reframes the core question: not “what intervention produces the best RCT result” but “what structural moves make the most other moves possible.” That is a more powerful question, and one that connects directly to climate adaptation, food systems, and AI governance in African contexts.
If there’s a real research agenda here applying complexity economics to EA cause prioritization in Sub-Saharan Africa, identifying high-leverage structural interventions that the current EA portfolio underweights because they resist standard impact metrics.