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China has enjoyed high economic growth for more than three decades since the initiative of economic reform in early 1980s. This growth has been driven mainly by labor-intensive export-oriented manufacturing activities. Yet, there are remarkably few empirical studies of the link between export diversification and economic growth. In this paper, the effect of export diversification on economic growth in Chinese provinces in the period 2000–2006 is examined. The findings support cross-country evidence that regions with diversified export baskets enjoy higher economic growth. However, it is found that the growth benefits are linked to diversification of export products, rather than geographical diversification of exports. Further, it is also found that the growth effect and export diversification may have a nonlinear relationship. As such, governments promoting export diversification should distinguish the diversification of export products from that of export destinations. Their policies should also change as regional economies develop.

This paper adds new empirical evidence to the recent literature about the ways countries develop strong productive capacities by analyzing the patterns of export diversification across different levels of manufacturing content. In addition to the measures commonly used to study diversification, such as the number of active export lines and measures of “discoveries in exports”, we propose two new filters based on the concept of revealed comparative advantage (RCA). We use trade data at the 4-digit level for 176 countries from 1992 until 2011, and we classify all the products into three manufacturing categories (unprocessed, semi processed and finished goods). Data confirms that growing countries continue to add new commodities to their exports basket until they reach around US$ 25,000 of GDP per capita. More interestingly, we found that for many countries expanding the spectrum of commodities exported with comparative advantage (RCA) actually contribute to boosting new productive capacities in manufacturing sectors. This finding is robust to different econometric models and different country groups.

This paper examines the impact of export diversification and ICT on aggregate and skill-level employment for a sample of 45 and 33 countries from 1990 to 2019 and 1995 to 2019 for OECD & G20 country groups. GMM dynamic panel estimation results suggest that more product-wise concentrated exports lead to new employment opportunities overall, but not geographically diversified exports. Internet has substitution effects on overall employment whereas mobile is insignificant. A greater product-wise diversified export structure expands low-skill-intensive jobs, but greater geographical diversification expands high-skill-intensive jobs. Internet use promotes high-skill-intensive jobs but displaces low-skilled workers. Mobile is found to expand job opportunities for low-skilled workers.

This paper critically examines the impact of countries’ participation and positions in Global Value Chains (GVCs) on their export diversification and quality for 43 G20 and OECD countries over the period 1990–2015. GMM dynamic panel estimation reveals that deeper GVC integration significantly influences export structures, with countries positioned downstream in the value chain exhibiting more diversified exports (overall and at the intensive margin) but have concentrated exports at the extensive margin and geographically. Conversely, upstream, more factor-based GVC activities tend to result in less diversified export portfolios. Greater GVC participation leads to a more diversified export product basket but more concentrated export destinations in terms of the Hirschman index. However, the association between export diversification and GVC participation varies across measures of diversification and country’s level of economic development. We further find that countries and sectors having larger export share in downstream of the supply chain and have a lower extent of GVC participation, export quality differentiated product. These outcomes suggest that GVC participation and position play crucial roles in shaping national export strategies and economic resilience, with downstream activities offering pathways to enhanced export diversification and quality improvement. The study contributes to the understanding of how global production fragmentation impacts the complexity and sophistication of countries’ export baskets. The outcomes provide guidance for policymakers to strategically leverage GVC engagement to foster export diversification, quality improvement and economic resilience.

This paper investigates trade volatility in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Plus Three (ASEAN+3) and its links with output volatility, export diversification, and free trade agreements. To achieve this research objective, we apply several econometric estimators to data from all ASEAN+3 member states over the period 1990–2016. We first find evidence of a positive relationship between output volatility and trade volatility. Second, we reveal that the way export diversification is measured can influence its impacts on bilateral export volatility. Moreover, the relationship between income volatility, trade volatility, and export diversification seems to depend on country size and the level of economic development.

This paper assesses the impact of export diversification in developing countries and particularly Least developed countries (LDCs) on the relative preferential margin that they enjoy in accessing preference-granters’ market. The analysis is carried out in a gravity-type model comprising 19 developed countries and 54 beneficiaries of non-reciprocal trade preferences from these developed countries, over the period 2002–2007. The empirical analysis suggests a non-linear relationship between the degree of export diversification in developing countries and the relative preferential margin that they benefit from developed preference-granting countries. However, it appears that the latter encourage LDCs to diversify their export products by providing them with higher trade preference advantages compared to their competitors in their markets.

We examine the impact of export diversification on total factor productivity (TFP) growth in case of 28 emerging market economies (EMEs) using annual data from 1995 to 2014. The results indicate that export diversification has significant positive impact on TFP growth. Further the results show that the TFP growth contributes more towards output growth as compared to factor accumulation in case of highly export diversified countries. The policy suggests that the emerging countries should focus more on export diversification-led-growth via productivity channel.