PONE-D-20-04110

Economic complexity of prefectures in Japan

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Chakraborty,

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Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Partly

Reviewer #3: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: In their articles, the Authors analyze the economic complexity of the Japan industrial sector, with the aim of relating the healthy of the economic system with the geographical division of the considered region. In particular, they analyze the different prefectures that are present in Japan, firstly considering how similar are the industrial sectors that can be found in each of the prefectures. Then, they apply a series of published methods that are ad-hoc adapted for their case study to evaluate the economic health of each of the prefectures. The analysis is deeply done, and it can be followed even from readers, like me, that are not expert in this specific research field (a thing that is valuable for a broad impact journal like PlosOne).

I have three minor criticisms/suggestions, that in my opinion would greatly improve the paper:

1. To allow an easier understanding of the results even to not Japanese people, I suggest the Authors to add at list a figure in which there is the Japan geographical map divided into the different prefectures. The best, would be to present each of the obtained results suitably color coding a map: this would be very easy, for example, for Figs 1 and 2 (you just have to color the founded clusters of the tree and put the figure side of the tree...). A step in this direction would be very interesting also for the other figures, even if less obvious.

2. While the study is based on the geographical unit of the prefecture, it would be interesting to give an insight on the impact of the regional division. How the obtained results relate with the divisions in regions of the prefectures?

3. Finally, I think that the work the authors presented at the Complex Network conference that has exactly the same title should be properly referenced in the paper.

Reviewer #2: The authors apply the economic complexity methodology to the bipartite network of economic sectors and Japanese prefectures. Even if I am sympathetic with respect to the methodology, I do not think that the manuscript can be published in the present form. The authors could try to deeply revise it, trying to add economical and or theoretical investigations.

The main problem is the scientific contribution of this manuscript. It is stated in the abstract that "studies on economic complexity at the regional level are lacking", quite in contradiction with lines 32-33 "economic complexity has been studied at the regional level for China [12], Brazil [10], the US and the UK [5]", and I could add Mexico [1], Italy [2], Spain[3], and even Australia[4]. All these studies follow more or less the same route: first, a database is obtained with the export structure (i.e., different products) of each sub-national entity; then some normalization is performed (RCA); then the ECI or the Fitness or the Product Space algorithm is applied.

I believe that publishing the same exercise with different data is not very interesting from a scientific point of view. This analysis can be of some utility for Japanese policymakers, but does not add much to these known methodologies and also the economic meaning is not much discussed, for instance, with respect to more standard economical approaches. In conclusion, I find the data interesting but I think the authors should make a large effort to provide some better contribution to the literature.

Moreover, other important methodological issues are present:

- Some sectors are excluded from the analysis in a quite arbitrary way (as stated, because they are only linked to Tokyo, and this results in zero fitness for the other prefectures). Whether this is a data or a methodological problem, it should be clearly stated and discussed.

- The economic complexity methodology is usually applied to export data. Here RCA is computed from annual sales, which include internal and external production in a highly biased way. Both the use of sales instead of export and RCA should be motivated, possibly with some references.

- From Figures 4 and 6 it emerges that all the correlations are driven by Tokyo. What happens if it is removed?

Minor issues:

- Lines 101-102 are inaccurate. k_{p,N} is not the diversity of prefecture, as incorrectly stated, but the ECI. The diversity is k0. The same applies to sectors.

- The mathematical derivation in lines 104-125 is well known in the literature (ref. [7] and [24] of the paper), so it is quite useless.

- Also, the (quite elementary) similarity measures for both prefectures (pag.5) and sectors (page 6) is from [7].

- On lines 188-189 it is stated that "k p,0 and k p,1 are slightly negatively correlated (Pearson correlation coefficient r = −0.230 and p-value = 0.119)", which I find rather surprising. These iterative methods are supposed to converge to some "real value" of the economic complexity, providing better and better assessments as the iteration procedure goes on, so I would expect them to be highly correlated.

[1] Chávez, J. C., Mosqueda, M. T., & Gómez-Zaldívar, M. (2017). Economic complexity and regional growth performance: Evidence from the Mexican Economy. Review of Regional Studies, 47(2), 201-219.

[2] Basile, R., Cicerone, G., & Iapadre, L. (2019). Economic complexity and regional labor productivity distribution: evidence from Italy.

[3] Balsalobre, S. J. P., Verduras, C. L., & Lanchas, J. D. (2017). Measuring the Economic Complexity at the sub-national level using international and interregional trade.

[4] Reynolds, C., Agrawal, M., Lee, I., Zhan, C., Li, J., Taylor, P., ... & Roos, G. (2018). A sub-national economic complexity analysis of Australia’s states and territories. Regional Studies, 52(5), 715-726.

Reviewer #3: The paper is technically sound and the database is fantastic.

The statistical analysis is also adequate but more could be done with such a detailed database

The paper is also well written in English

The authors have made clear where the data was got from but I am not sure if they can share the detailed information on the firms. Could you please clarify this issue?

For more detailed comments please see my report.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

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Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: PONE-D-20-04110_referee_report.pdf

PONE-D-20-04110R1

Economic complexity of prefectures in Japan

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Chakraborty,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Sep 13 2020 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

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• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Hocine Cherifi

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #3: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: I'm completely satisfied with the Authors' paper revision, even if most of my comments have been answered in the SI. In my opinion, given also the Authors' reply, some figure should be moved in the main text, but I leave the Authors do what they think is the best.

Reviewer #3: I made a question in my previous revision but I am not satisfied with the answer. The authors should elaborate a lot more in their response and include it in the paper. I am referring to the question and reply below:

3) Is there a specific reason for the authors to use the unweighted version of the bipartite

network? I think that the weighted version can be quite useful in order to put monetary value to

the metrics, even for the projections the monetary value of the similarity can be quite useful as

well as a possible centrality study.

The algorithm that measures economic complexity index and product complexity index is

applied on a binary bipartite matrix [PNAS 106(26),10570 (2009)]. This is the reason we have

used the unweighted version of the bipartite network.

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Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #3: No

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

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Economic complexity of prefectures in Japan

PONE-D-20-04110R2

Dear Dr. Chakraborty,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

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Hocine Cherifi

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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