The World is Not Flat: Persistence in the Hierarchy of Economic Complexity Across a Century

In this Academic Research Seminar, Gregor Semieniuk will discuss his paper “The World is Not Flat: Persistence in the Hierarchy of Economic Complexity Across a Century.”

Speaker: Gregor Semieniuk, Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy and Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The speaker will be online but a viewing will be held in the Perkins Room (R-429). Room attendance is permitted for the Harvard community, the Zoom session is open to the public. Whether attending in person or virtually, please register  in advance.

Authors: Isabella M. Weber, Gregor Semieniuk, Junshang Liang, Tom Westland

Paper Abstract: To explain long-run cross-country differences in income, most studies focus on persistent non-economic factors as drivers such as culture, institutions and geography. In this paper, we examine a more distinctly economic explanation: persistence in countries’ economic complexity. We construct a new global commodity-level export dataset from the peak of the ‘First Globalization’ prior to the First World War to analyze economic complexity across the first and the current waves of globalization. We show that economic complexity is highly persistent, and a powerful predictor of national income across the world today even when controlling for historical institutions, colonial status, geography and when considering alternative measures of complexity. We exploit the switch from sailing to steamboat transport, which had heterogenous effects on global trading costs to argue that the persistence is not driven by omitted variables. We further confirm the plausibility of persistence by explicitly testing the transmission mechanism of path-dependence in capabilities, showing that when countries moved into new export lines, they were more likely to move into products that were proximate to ones they already exported.

Speaker Bio: Gregor Semieniuk is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy and Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research focuses on structural change and economic development in the context of climate change and its mitigation, and he often studies these problems through the lens of economic inequality. Gregor’s work has been published in 24 peer-reviewed articles including multiple times in Nature Climate Change and Nature Energy, and four of them are among the top 1% cited in their field according to Web of Science. Gregor’s work is often mentioned in the media, including the Financial Times, Guardian, Bloomberg and the Economist, and he has advised international organizations and testified before the Senate’s Committee on the Budget. From 2023 to 2025, Gregor worked as a Senior Climate Change Economist on staff at the World Bank, providing technical leadership on decarbonization strategies and industrial policy for clean tech investments with a focus on Eastern Europe. Before joining UMass Amherst, Gregor was a Lecturer (the UK’s assistant professor) in Economics at SOAS University of London.

The Growth Lab’s Research Seminar series is a weekly seminar that brings together researchers from across the academic spectrum who share an interest in growth and development.