World Bank Group

05/05/2025 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 05/03/2025 18:21

Thinking about Development Differently: Complexity and Network-Based Approaches for Policy

REGISTER TO PARTICIPATE ONLINE HERE

Registrants will be sent the WebEx connection details via email shortly after completing registration.

Co-hosted by the World Bank's Poverty Global Department and the Regional Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), this one-day event explores how complexity science and network-based methods can bring fresh insights to development research and policy. Discover how these tools can help reveal the hidden structures and systemic interactions that shape observed patterns of growth, poverty, and resilience-and how these insights can help inform innovative approaches to integrated policymaking. The event will feature a keynote address by Professor Cesar Hidalgo, followed by a series of presentations applying these approaches to critical areas such as the green transition, the digital economy, multidimensional poverty, and the interlinked nature of development goals.

9:00-9:30 Welcome Coffee

9:30-10:30

Opening Session: Complexity and Development

Welcome Remarks

  • Luis Felipe Lopez-Calva, Director, Poverty Global Department, World Bank
Keynote Address: Practical Applications of Economic Complexity
  • Cesar Hidalgo, Professor, Toulouse School of Economics and Director, Center for Collective Learning
The notion that developing economies benefit from upgrading their productive structure has recently become an important tenet of international development. The growth of this idea follows from work on economic complexity, which shows that machine learning methods provide powerful tools that can be used to create fine-grained measures of economic potential. In this presentation, Cesar Hidalgo will provide a quick overview of economic complexity methods with a focus on their practical applications. He will show examples of how these methods are being used throughout the developing world to navigate present-day tariff uncertainties and to develop long-term developments strategies and analytical capacities.

10:30-11:15

Presentation: Complexity Economics and Computational Methods for Economic Policymaking

Omar A Guerrero, Head of Computational Social Science Research, Alan Turing Institute

Chair: Almudena Fernández, Chief Economist for Latin America and the Caribbean, UNDP

Since the 1990s, complexity economics has developed various approaches to analyze economic systems. As computing power and large datasets have become commonplace, the need to move beyond "toy" models and purely data-driven frameworks to develop models that are meaningful for policy intervention has become self-evident. This presentation will provide an overview of two programmes of research that have made significant progress in this regard: one focusing on SDG8 (labour markets) and another on the interdependencies and trade-offs between the SDGs.

Useful links:

Policy Priority Inference

Labour Dynamics

11:15-11:30

Coffee Break

11:30-12:15

Presentation: Measuring the Intensity and Geography of AI-Assisted Coding

Johannes Wachs, Professor at Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary (Virtual)

Chair: Maria Eugenia Genoni, Lead Economist, Poverty Global Department, World Bank

If AI coding assistants raise productivity, uneven adoption will widen existing economic disparities. We detect AI-generated code in the contributions of over 300k developers on GitHub from 2018-2024. By mid-2024, we estimate 26% of code contributed by US-based developers was written using AI, compared with 22% in Germany and France, 18% in India, 15% in Russia, and 10% in China. We find heterogeneity by tenure but not gender, and that AI use increases user activity and exploration.

12:15-1:15

Lunch

1:15-2:00

Presentation: Development Acupuncture: The Network Structure of Multidimensional Poverty and Its Implications

Viktor Stojkoski, Researcher, Faculty of Economics in Skopje and the Center for Collective Learning

Chair: Diego Zavaleta, Senior Advisor on Strategy and Partnerships, UNDP

Poverty is multidimensional. Despite significant progress in measuring poverty multidimensionally, there is still a limited understanding of how dimensions interact and co-evolve over time-ultimately hindering effective integrated policy making. Using network science and economic complexity methods, this research introduces two measures: the Poverty Space (a network visualizing interactions among poverty dimensions) and Poverty Centrality (which identifies the importance of each dimension). These measures point to key "nodes" in the structure of multidimensional poverty where targeted interventions could potentially lead to a greater effect on the system as a whole.

Useful links:

Network Structure of Multidimensional Poverty

2:00-2:45

Presentation: People, Products & Policies: Charting Adjacent Possible Development Pathways in the Green Transition

Penny Mealy, Senior Economist, Climate Change Group, World Bank (Virtual)

Chair: Gabriela Inchauste, Practice Manager, Poverty Global Department, World Bank

How can the green transition be a driver of inclusive development and poverty reduction? This talk draws on the concept of the adjacent possible-the boundary between what is and what could be-to explore feasible and strategic development pathways for people and places on a livable planet. We will look at how workers can transition into better jobs, how countries can capture value from emerging green technologies and global supply chains, and how policy mixes can be strategically designed and tailored to national contexts.

2:45-3:00

Close

  • Luis Felipe López-Calva, Host
    Director, Poverty Global Department, World Bank

    Luis Felipe López-Calva is the Director of the Poverty Global Department in the Prosperity Vertical at the World Bank. He has over 25 years of experience working with international institutions and advising national governments. Prior to rejoining the World Bank in 2022, he served as UN Assistant Secretary General and Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the United Nations Development Program. Previously at the World Bank, López-Calva led research, financing, and policy engagement on poverty and inequality issues across multiple regions, and served as the Co-Director for the World Development Report 2017 on Governance and the Law. López-Calva has also held various positions in academia including at Harvard University, Stanford University, University of California-San Diego and the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research. His research interests focus on labor markets, poverty and inequality, institutions, and the microeconomics of development. He holds a Master's degree in Economics from Boston University, as well as a Master's and a PhD in Economics from Cornell University.

  • Cesar A. Hidalgo, Keynote Speaker
    Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Toulouse School of Economics (TSE) Director, Center for Collective Learning, IAST, TSE & CIAS, Corvinus University of Budapest

    César A. Hidalgo is a Chilean-Spanish-American scholar, Professor at the Toulouse School of Economics (TSE), and head of the Center for Collective Learning (CCL), a multidisciplinary research laboratory with offices at TSE and at Corvinus University of Budapest. Hidalgo is known for developing methods to estimate economic complexity and relatedness, building several national economic data observatories (oec.world, datamexico.org, datasaudi.sa, etc.), and proposing the idea of augmented democracy. These contributions have been recognized with numerous awards including the 2018 Lagrange Prize and three Webby Awards. Hidalgo holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Notre Dame and is the author of three books, The Atlas of Economic Complexity, Why Information Grows, and How Humans Judge Machines. His next book, The Infinite Alphabet, explores the principles governing the growth, diffusion, and valuation of knowledge.

  • Almudena Fernández
    Chief Economist for Latin America and the Caribbean, UNDP

    Almudena Fernández is UNDP's Chief Economist for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), leading the SDG and Policy Team, providing strategic policy advice on economic trends, forecasts and challenges across the region and their impact on achieving the SDGs. She is also in charge of the LAC regional office's research and knowledge production programme, including the production of the Regional Human Development Report, in close collaboration with the UNDP-wide network of economists. With more than 16 years of experience in technical positions at UNDP, she has led the development of content and knowledge products in the region and specializes in issues related to inequality, poverty, innovation, and sustainable development in LAC. She holds a master's degree in public administration from Columbia University, and a bachelor's degree in Economics and Anthropology from the University of Chicago, USA.

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