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We present a new approach for the economic analysis of countries, which we apply to the case of the Netherlands. Our study is based on a novel way to quantify exported products' complexity and countries' fitness which has been recently introduced in the literature. Adopting a framework in which products are clustered in sectors, we compare the different branches of the export of the Netherlands, taking into account the time evolution of their volumes, complexities and competitivenesses in the years 1995-2010. The High Tech and Life Sciences sectors share high quality products but low competitiveness; the opposite is true for Horticulture and Energy. We analyze in detail the Chemicals sector, finding a declining global complexity which is mostly driven by a shift towards products of lower quality. A growth forecast is also provided. In light of our results we suggest a differentiation in policy between the country's self-defined industrial sectors.

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Amsterdam University PressAll rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owners and the authors of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.The chapter 'Building resilience through teamwork: Seven tips to make it work' by Marco Albani and Kimberly Henderson simultaneously appears in the McKinsey on SRP Compendium. ContentsEditor's foreword 9 Roland KupersPreface 13 Peter VoserTurbulence -by way of an introduction 17 Michel LièsPart I Introduction to RAI Editor's foreword Roland KupersFaced with an increasingly turbulent world and armed with an intuitive insight as to what was driving the turbulence, the CEO's of a group of multinational companies spanning across multiple industries joined forces to explore what their value could and should be in such a changed context. Turbulence is at the same time familiar and somewhat frightening. Familiar when we dial up the volume on a water tap and the water suddenly no longer flows smoothly. Somewhat frightening when colliding airflows mix and lead to a bumpy flight. Something similar happens in socio-economic systems, interacting with the natural environment.1 When these systems are tightly coupled, they are likely to stumble across a threshold into turbulent behaviour. Stock markets crash, commodity prices leap, social unrest or extreme weather events occur. The insight the CEOs shared was that the ever-greater demands on food, water and energy systems, in the context of a changing climate, meant that in the future turbulence was likely to become a much more regular feature of the modern world.In a turbulent world, it would no longer be enough to drive ever-higher economic efficiency and meet ever-more demanding customer needs. Those demands will not go away. What will be added is a requirement to make our socio-economic systems more resilient to the turbulence. To find out what this means and how multinational corporations can contribute, they assembled a project under the banner of the Resilience Action Initiative (RAI). In this book the companies share what they have learnt in their first two years of exploration.Whenever I have described the story of RAI to people, they have inevitably rushed to the conclusion that the work is only about the resilience of the companies themselves. It is not. Certainly companies need to be resilient, but that is something they worry about continuously and which is part of the core task of management and the board. The premise for RAI is that companies effectively have a societal licence to operate over the long term, but only if they meet a fundamental social need. Cynics may well...

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