The Economic Complexity of the Western Roman Empire

Researchers used a large geocoded corpus of Latin inscriptions (LIST) to infer the spatial distribution of occupations in the Western Roman Empire and compute an Economic Complexity Index (ECI) for ancient polities. Funerary and honorific inscriptions often name professions, so location-tagged occupational mentions serve as proxies for local economic activities; the team developed bias-correction procedures to account for strong status and gender skews, the near-absence of farmers in the record, and uneven discovery/digitization. The cleaned occupation-by-place matrix shows a classic nested structure, enabling standard ECI calculation both by Roman province and by any spatial partitioning allowed by the coordinates.

Comparing ECI estimates derived from Roman-era inscriptions to modern ECI values for roughly 23 corresponding contemporary countries yields a significant Spearman rank correlation, implying a long-term persistence or “stickiness” of economic complexity across roughly fifteen centuries. The work stops short of claiming causality and flags limitations: bias corrections need refinement and the parallel Greek-inscription dataset (GIST) is not yet digitized to comparable standards, complicating extension to the Eastern Empire. The study demonstrates a viable methodology for extracting economic structure from epigraphic evidence and opens empirical questions about historical continuity in regional economic sophistication.