[johnobrien1010]

I think I must be looking at this wrong, how are "Photographic plates and film, exposed and developed, other than motion-picture film" the most complex product? Surely CPUs are harder to make than that? Maybe it is old categories and there is where new things like CPUs are found?

[spenczar5]

It gets worse. “Metal chain” is more complex (1.47) than “nuclear reactors” (1.41). “Stainless steel wire” is more complex (1.21) than “aircraft launching gear” (0.5), and so on.

It’s just a poorly defined metric. “Product complexity” is computed by looking at the countries which export the product. A product is “more complex” if its exporters make a lot of different products, and those things are commonly exported by other countries too.

So photographic equipment is only made in a small number of countries (germany, japan) which are very integrated in the world economy. Processors probably fare worse because Taiwan makes them and is “insufficiently” complex.

[openrisk]

Indeed the definition is somewhat of an extrapolation. Product complexity defined in this way probably misses on intricate supply chain dependencies too. E.g., EUV lithography is essential for modern chips, but it is produced by ASML in NL - which is otherwise in steady economic complexity decline for decades (from rank 15 in 1995 to rank 26 in 2021). Small country specialization might not be normalized adequately.

Eyeballing the rankings the methodology is probably biased towards manufacturing materials supply chain complexity rather than "knowledge economy" complexity.

Nevertheless its probably directionally correct at more aggregate levels.

[udev]

You answered your question.

Making a CPU requires exactly "photographic plates and film, exposed and developed, other than motion-picture film", i.e lithography and more and more extreme wavelengths.