Cesar Hidalgo creates visualizations of economies as highlighted in Tim Hartford’s recent book Adapt.
This images are based on a mass of data to look at the materials an economy produces and compare different economies with each other, or with themselves over time. It’s a interesting approach to making sense of a large quantity of data.
You can try it yourself here.
Well worth spending some time, both to understand the Atlas of Economic Complexity (concepts, research, algorithms, product space, etc.) as well as the Observatory with interactive charts.
If you are interested in an overview, I posted a two-part series about it on my Data Visualization Blog http://visualign.wordpress.com