Economic complexity visualized in a treemap

The observatory of Economic complexity is a website created by MIT Media lab to display visually the economic complexity of countries.

You can compare infovis of exports of different countries to grasp the differences: my favourite is the treemap, a powerful information visualization technique invented by Ben Schneiderman and refined by his collaborators through the years.

Let’s see Switzerland:

tree_map_export_che_all_show_2010

Quite surprisingly the major export of Switzerland is gold! Followed by chemicals, medicaments and “human and animal blood”! Who would have guessed so?

And now let’s compare it to India:

760px-India_treemap

India is also exporting precious jewellery. with a qucick look you can compare colours and the size of the rectangles to have an overview of the differnt sectors the two coutries specialize in. See the interactive version on the MIT website, and you can also trace change in time of coutries’ economic complexity.

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