Lelo Nxumalo

The complex interconnections that define modern society are readily visible in our Facebook or LinkedIn networks. But what about the corporate world? I recently began mapping the web of cross-shareholding among Malaysia's listed corporations. Using Social Network Analysis (SNA), I visualized the ecosystem to identify key "communities" and power brokers. The goal? To see if a company's position in this web predicts its financial destiny. The State of Play (2015) Figure 1: Malaysia's Corporate Network in 2015 (Created via Gephi) The map above visualizes the network as of 2015. While I have excluded specific company names, the "super-nodes" (the largest circles) represent the most connected shareholders in the economy—primarily government-linked investment companies (GLICs), fund managers, and international asset managers. A Decade of Growing Complexity ...

One of the growing forces in our understanding of what drives growth in different countries is the Harvard and MIT designed Economic Complexity Index (ECI). According to Harvard's Atlas of Economic Complexity, ECI is "a measure of the knowledge in a society that gets translated into the products it makes. The most complex products are sophisticated chemicals and machinery, whereas the world’s least complex products are raw materials or simple agricultural products. The economic complexity of a country is dependent on the complexity of the products it exports. A country is considered ‘complex’ if it exports not only highly complex products (determined by the PRODUCT COMPLEXITY INDEX), but also a large number of different products." Below is a motion chart showing the ECI and country rankings against measures of economic performance, namely GDP per person. The default graph setting has real GDP per capita on the x axis (the further right the richer a country is) and E...