Universal Features in the Growth Dynamics of Complex Organizations

We analyze the fluctuations in the gross domestic product (GDP) of 152 countries for the period 1950–1992. We find that (i) the distribution of annual growth rates for countries of a given GDP decays with “fatter” tails than for a Gaussian, and (ii) the width of the distribution scales as a power law of GDP with a scaling exponent $\beta \approx 0.15$. Both findings are in surprising agreement with results on firm growth. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the evolution of organizations with complex structure is governed by similar growth mechanisms.