The economic complexity of the Roman Empire as inferred from Latin inscriptions

Economic complexity is a powerful tool to estimate the productive capabilities and future growth of modern economies. Little is known about how economic complexity evolves over long periods in history. In this paper, we use archeological evidence from the Roman Empire in the form of short texts preserved on a durable material (i.e., inscriptions) to estimate the economic complexity of the various provinces of the empire. By connecting the occupations listed in the text of inscriptions with the location in which the inscribed objects were found, we can estimate that the most complex areas during the first four centuries of the Roman Empire have a remarkable and statistically significant overlap with the most complex countries today. This is a surprising result running counter the expectations from historiography, and we lack an explanation for the reason of this supposed preservation of economic complexity through the ages – both factors pointing at the need of future work to integrate Greek inscriptions. However, this evidence provides a suggestion about how difficult the development of economic capabilities might be.