Empirical Confirmation of Creative Destruction from World Trade Data
Figure 1
Development of export product diversities.
Countries’ export product diversities for (a) 1984, (b) 2000 and the net change in diversity between these years (c) are shown for world trade data (blue lines) and the Schumpeterian diversity dynamics model (red). There is a general tendency towards increased diversity which is strongest for countries having initially an intermediate product diversity. The results for diversity change are obtained by using only the subset of countries having non-zero export values in each year. The number of (dis)appearance events for each (d) country and (e) product are shown in the panel to the right for data and model. The model does not only reproduce the general trend of increasing diversity, but also the detailed profile of how many appearance and disappearance events could be observed for different countries and products. Note that in (a)-(c) countries are ranked by their initial diversity, whereas in (d) they are ranked by their number of events. For a goodness-of-fit test between model and data we report the correlation coefficientp between data and model results, and thep-value up to which the null hypothesis of no correlation between model and data can be rejected. For the final diversity in (b) we find,
and for diversity changes in (c)
,
. For the appearances (disappearances) per country in (d) we find
,
(
,
), for appearances (disappearances) per product (e)
,
(
,
).