Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC)

The Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC) is a website for visualising and distributing data on where economic activities happen and how they change, drawing data from many sources.¹ It began in MIT's Collective Learning group, formerly the Macro Connections group, as Alex Simoes's 2012 master's thesis supervised by César Hidalgo.¹ It was spun out of MIT as an open-source project in 2012 and is now designed and built by the company Datawheel.¹ Version 5.0, launched in the summer of 2021, added subnational data for regions and provinces in more than 30 countries and introduced paid subscriptions.¹ The OEC asks to be cited through the 2011 paper by Simoes and Hidalgo, "The Economic Complexity Observatory: An Analytical Tool for Understanding the Dynamics of Economic Development".¹

The site is built around profile pages, with charts such as treemaps, networks, scatter plots and maps, and complexity rankings country by country and product by product.^1,4 The free international datasets include trade classified by SITC revision 2 from 1962 to 2018 and by each revision of the Harmonized System from 1992 to 2022, with complexity indicators, the World Bank's development indicators and tariffs from WITS.⁵ Its HS 1992 trade table runs from 1995 to 2024.⁶ Some countries' own customs records add monthly and regional detail.^1,6

Economic complexity is the OEC's other strand. The Economic Complexity Index (ECI) estimates an economy's productive know-how from the range of activities present in it, and the Product Complexity Index (PCI) estimates the complexity needed to make a product.² The OEC explains it with an exam marked in an unknown language: hard questions are those few students get right, and a student who gets hard questions right is likely a strong student. In the same way, places stand in for students and products for questions.² The OEC computes the index from four kinds of data: trade, patent applications, research publications and software development.² It says the index has been shown to predict a country's income, growth, inequality and greenhouse gas emissions.²

The free plan covers the full history of annual trade between every country and product, the charts and the complexity rankings, and the international datasets download in bulk without a subscription.^4,5 Many API endpoints, including historical international trade, need no authentication.³ On 26 October 2026 the Pro plan was $299 a month. It adds the latest monthly data for 53 countries, an API key, and trade by region for 18 countries.⁴ Premium, at $1,999 a month, adds company-level search, shipment records from US customs filings (bills of lading) and bulk national datasets.⁴ Researchers and students get half price.⁴ Visualisations of international trade data may be reused under a CC0 public-domain dedication.¹

For someone modelling a place, the OEC is a quick way to see what a country exports and imports and from whom, and for some countries what each region trades.^1,4 Its complexity measures suit questions about which industries a country or region is likely to grow into.² The figures are national or regional, not those of a single town or firm, except for the paid company data.⁴