balassa_index {economiccomplexity} R Documentation

## Balassa Index

### Description

balassa_index() computes the Balassa Index for a bipartite relation between countries and products.

### Usage

balassa_index(
data,
discrete = TRUE,
cutoff = 1,
country = "country",
product = "product",
value = "value"
)


### Arguments

 data (Type: data.frame, matrix or dgCMatrix) a dataset such as galactic_federation containing countries, products and exported values. discrete (Type: logical) whether converting the Balassa Index to discrete (0/1) values. Anything below the specified cutoff is converted to 0 and 1 otherwise. By default this is set to TRUE. cutoff (Type: numeric) the cutoff to use for discretization. By default this is set to 1. country (Type: character) the column with the countries. By default this is set to "country". Used only if the input is a data.frame. product (Type: character) the column with the products. By default this is set to "product". Used only if the input is a data.frame. value (Type: character) the column with the metric for country-product pairs. By default this is set to "value". Used only if the input is a data.frame.

### Details

The current implementation follows (Mariani et al. 2015) to obtain a metric for specialisation. In the context of international trade, if the Balassa Index for a country-product pair is more than 1, it means that country is specialized in that product. If the input for this function is a data.frame instead of a matrix, the function shall aggregate the data and convert the input to a matrix.

### Value

A matrix with the Balassa Index.

### References

Mariani M, Vidmer A, Medo M, Zhang Y (2015). “Measuring economic complexity of countries and products: which metric to use?” The European Physical Journal B, 88(11), 293. doi: 10.1140/epjb/e2015-60298-7.

and the references therein.

### Examples

bi <- balassa_index(world_trade_avg_1998_to_2000)

# partial view of index
bi[1:5,1:5]



[Package economiccomplexity version 1.1 Index]