SNA as a tool to understand impact of economy policies.

Governments around the world strive to find the best combination of economic policies that can foster a GDP growth at low inflation rates. For instance, governments through their central banks and other institutions can incentivize the population to spend/save more money by increasing or decreasing the government debt interest rate which has an impact in the grow of an economy. This is one of many polices that government can implement to manage their economy by affecting desired industries.

However, government fails to achieve the desire outcome trough new economic policies; government makes assumptions and predict how different agents (companies, individuals) will react to the new policies but if they fail doing that, the policies will not have the desired effect; even worst, it can have negatives effects which leads to high costs for a nation.

In that sense, it is important to understand what motivates the different economy agents to act in certain way or what motivates them to take some decisions. For that, the social network analysis can be suitable to find the relation between different economy policies and economy agents. The data needed is big and has to include all sectors of the population as well as industries.

Different institutions from the government has to participate in this research to determine all possible economic policies; after that, surveys to individuals and companies can be done to find how those policies make them take one or other decision. For instance, a company can decide to invest in new assets if the interest rates are decreasing, with no change in tariffs and low inflation.

Once gathered all the data, social network analysis can be performed to determine what policies has the greatest influence in the economy and in that way, governments can determine the best economic policies to implement. Centrality measures are useful to determine the policies with higher impact. In general, policies with high eigenvector are the most important for governments; also, high degree policies are element to focus in the analysis.

In order to use SNA as a tool, the magnitude if the research has to be big and extensive, which adds complexity however, the potential benefits for the economy of a country is also huge; making it worthy for a nation.

In conclusion, SNA as a tool for governments for determining the effect of different economic policies can be helpful to understand how agents react to these policies, which ultimately leads to take the best policies resulting in better economic performance of a nation; though, the research for achieving that can be complex and can require a high quantity of resources. Nevertheless, the benefits of understating the effects of different policies is higher than the effort that can be needed to make the research.