The Observatory of Economic Complexity


The Observatory of Economic Complexity is a data visualization site for international trade data created by the Macro Connections group at the MIT Media Lab. The goal of the observatory is to distribute international trade data in a visual form. At present the observatory serves more than 20 million interactive visualizations, connecting hundreds of countries to their export destinations and to the products that they trade.

Visualizations

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Products, represented by rectangles, are drawn from the 775 individual product classes found in the Standardized International Trade Code at the four-digit level. The rectangle's color corresponds to the 34 product communities found in the Product Space and other visualizations from The Observatory of Economic Complexity. Product Exports Treemaps in The Observatory of Economic Complexity graphically represent product's share of a nation's trade. The larger the size of the rectangle, the larger the product's share of that country's imports or exports.
An example from Benin in 2009 is shown on the right.
Additional visual representations include
D3plus is the underlying engine responsible for generating all of the visualization used on the site. D3plus is an open source JavaScript library built on top of D3.js by Alexander Simoes and Dave Landry. It is also used on other visualization themed sites such as DataViva and Pantheon.