In the short-term, economies shift preferentially into new activities that
are related to ones they currently do. Such a tendency should have implications
for the nature of an economy's long-term development as well. We explore these
implications using a dynamical network model of an economy's movement into new
activities. First, we theoretically derive a pair of coordinates that summarize
long-term structural change. One coordinate captures overall ability across
activities, the other captures an economy's composition. Second, we show
empirically how these two measures intuitively summarize a variety of facts of
long-term economic development. Third, we observe that our measures resemble
complexity metrics, though our route to these metrics differs significantly
from previous ones. In total, our framework represents a dynamical approach
that bridges short- and long-term descriptions of structural change, and
suggests how different branches of economic complexity analysis could
potentially fit together in one framework.Comment: 11 pages + 21 pages supplementary text, 10 figure