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Inferring Networks of Interdependent Labor Skills to Illuminate Urban Economic Structure
Cities are among the best examples of complex systems. The adaptive components of a city, such as its people, firms, institutions, and physical structures, form intricate and often non-intuitive interdependencies with one another. These interdependencies can be quantified and represented as links of...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
MDPI
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7597157/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33286847 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e22101078 |
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author | Shutters, Shade T. Waters, Keith |
author_facet | Shutters, Shade T. Waters, Keith |
author_sort | Shutters, Shade T. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Cities are among the best examples of complex systems. The adaptive components of a city, such as its people, firms, institutions, and physical structures, form intricate and often non-intuitive interdependencies with one another. These interdependencies can be quantified and represented as links of a network that give visibility to otherwise cryptic structural elements of urban systems. Here, we use aspects of information theory to elucidate the interdependence network among labor skills, illuminating parts of the hidden economic structure of cities. Using pairwise interdependencies we compute an aggregate, skills-based measure of system “tightness” of a city’s labor force, capturing the degree of integration or internal connectedness of a city’s economy. We find that urban economies with higher tightness tend to be more productive in terms of higher GDP per capita. However, related work has shown that cities with higher system tightness are also more negatively affected by shocks. Thus, our skills-based metric may offer additional insights into a city’s resilience. Finally, we demonstrate how viewing the web of interdependent skills as a weighted network can lead to additional insights about cities and their economies. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7597157 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | MDPI |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-75971572020-11-09 Inferring Networks of Interdependent Labor Skills to Illuminate Urban Economic Structure Shutters, Shade T. Waters, Keith Entropy (Basel) Article Cities are among the best examples of complex systems. The adaptive components of a city, such as its people, firms, institutions, and physical structures, form intricate and often non-intuitive interdependencies with one another. These interdependencies can be quantified and represented as links of a network that give visibility to otherwise cryptic structural elements of urban systems. Here, we use aspects of information theory to elucidate the interdependence network among labor skills, illuminating parts of the hidden economic structure of cities. Using pairwise interdependencies we compute an aggregate, skills-based measure of system “tightness” of a city’s labor force, capturing the degree of integration or internal connectedness of a city’s economy. We find that urban economies with higher tightness tend to be more productive in terms of higher GDP per capita. However, related work has shown that cities with higher system tightness are also more negatively affected by shocks. Thus, our skills-based metric may offer additional insights into a city’s resilience. Finally, we demonstrate how viewing the web of interdependent skills as a weighted network can lead to additional insights about cities and their economies. MDPI 2020-09-25 /pmc/articles/PMC7597157/ /pubmed/33286847 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e22101078 Text en © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
spellingShingle | Article Shutters, Shade T. Waters, Keith Inferring Networks of Interdependent Labor Skills to Illuminate Urban Economic Structure |
title | Inferring Networks of Interdependent Labor Skills to Illuminate Urban Economic Structure |
title_full | Inferring Networks of Interdependent Labor Skills to Illuminate Urban Economic Structure |
title_fullStr | Inferring Networks of Interdependent Labor Skills to Illuminate Urban Economic Structure |
title_full_unstemmed | Inferring Networks of Interdependent Labor Skills to Illuminate Urban Economic Structure |
title_short | Inferring Networks of Interdependent Labor Skills to Illuminate Urban Economic Structure |
title_sort | inferring networks of interdependent labor skills to illuminate urban economic structure |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7597157/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33286847 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e22101078 |
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