The path to becoming an advanced economy can be a difficult one that is fraught with obstacles, traps, and frequent reversals. Yet in the past half century several East Asian nations have completed the journey by increasing their ‘economic fitness’, implementing structural changes and...

The characterization of the galaxy clustering properties in the universe is one of the most interesting and controversial issues in modern cosmology. Here we present the results of the analysis of the recently available three-dimensional catalogues of galaxies, performed with the tools of modern...

Networks representing social systems display specific features that put them apart from biological and technological ones. In particular, the number of links attached to a node is positively correlated to that of its nearest neighbours. We develop a model that reproduces this feature, starting...

Gravitational clustering of a random distribution of point masses is dominated by the effective short-range interactions due to large-scale isotropy. We introduce a one-dimensional cellular automaton to reproduce this effect in the most schematic way: at each time particles move towards their...

Ideas of Statistical Physics are very relevant for cosmic structures especially considering that the field is undergoing a period of exceptional development with many new data appearing on a monthly basis. In the past years we have focused mostly on galaxy distributions and their statistical...