Cultural Exports introduces a new approach for studying both connections between countries and the cultural impact of countries. Consider a native of a certain country who becomes famous in other countries–this person is in a sense a "cultural export" of his home country that is "imported" to other countries. For example, the popularity of Dominican baseball player Manny Ramirez in the USA and Korea makes him a cultural export of the Dominican Republic to these countries. Using Wikipedia biographies and search-engine data, we measure the popularity of people across different countries and languages, and break it down by each person's native country, period, and occupation. This allows us to map international cultural trade and identify major exporters and importers in different fields and times, as well as hubs for cultural trade (e.g., Greece for philosophy in classical times or USA for baseball nowadays).

Most interactions between cultures require overcoming a language barrier, either by learning the other culture's language or by using a third common language. Multilingual speakers thus play an important role in facilitating cross-cultural interaction. In addition, certain languages–not necessarily the most spoken ones–are more likely than others to serve as intermediary languages. The rise of online social networking services and platforms for user-generated digital content provides an opportunity for a large-scale study of lingual connections encompassing hundreds of millions of speakers all over the world. We mapped connections among over sixty languages by analyzing multilingual contributions among the authors of over a billion tweets and tens of millions of Wikipedia pages. Comparing this network of languages to real-world indicators of interaction between speakers of different languages–flights, trade, media coverage–we find the most connected languages and identify potential paths through which ideas disseminate from one culture to another.

With more than six billion people and 15 billion products, the world economy is anything but simple. The Economic Complexity Observatory is an online tool that helps people explore this complexity by providing tools that can allow decision makers to understand the connections that exist between countries and the myriad of products they produce and/or export. The Economic Complexity Observatory puts at everyone’s fingertips the latest analytical tools developed to visualize and quantify the productive structure of countries and their evolution.