Entropy-based economic complexity of China trade flows

The growing interest in the study of economic complexity has been motivated by the intrinsic features of statistical physics. Entropy is one of essential concepts in statistical physics and a particularly active concept for characterizing the complexity of a system. Motived by this, we propose a new method based on a function of the entropy to quantify economic complexity of China trade flows. We focus on regional economy activities, and collect China trade flows according to the database of national export and import items. Compared with classic economic complexity measurements including diversity and ubiquity, eigenvector-based complexity index, fitness and complexity index, Hirschman-Herfindahl index, the proposed method based on entropy can generate a proper ranking list when we take USA as a benchmark. Furthermore, the comparison of the main economic complexity statics also exposes that several of which performance moderate correlations. The stability of the ranking positions from the static evolution of the economic complexity over 8 years discloses that the index of economic complexity performs extremely sensitive depending on the eigenvector of the product network space. The results reveal that we should pay attention to the relationships between economic complexity methods when analysing the structural characteristics of economic entity activities.