Export Quality & Upgrading

The policy pushed weavers and merchants to build a domestic cloth-making industry, and English exports shifted over the following two centuries from raw wool to finished and dyed cloth, one of the earliest recorded cases of deliberate export upgrading.

Requiring goods to move on English ships and through English ports pushed processing, shipping and re-export earnings toward the home economy rather than foreign carriers, an early instance of a state capturing value-added activity through trade law.

The new government imported foreign technology and expertise wholesale, built state-owned model factories and shipyards, and deliberately shifted the country's exports from raw silk and tea toward manufactured textiles, ships and machinery within a generation.

The model described how manufacturing capacity and export sophistication migrate in sequence from a lead economy to followers, a pattern later used to explain Japan, then Korea and Taiwan, then China and Vietnam climbing the same ladder.

His work for the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America argued that countries exporting raw materials faced structurally worsening terms of trade against manufactured goods, giving intellectual grounding to decades of import-substitution and export-upgrading policy.

State-directed credit and investment shifted the economy from light manufacturing such as textiles and wigs toward steel, shipbuilding, machinery and petrochemicals, laying the industrial base for the country's later move into electronics and automobiles.

Tax breaks and proximity to research institutes drew electronics and semiconductor firms into a single cluster, giving Taiwan a template for moving from low-cost manufacturing into higher-value, technology-intensive production and exports.

The study distilled how Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong had deliberately climbed from light manufacturing to capital and technology-intensive exports, shaping development orthodoxy on state-guided industrial upgrading for a generation of policymakers.

Their research mapped which products countries could feasibly move into based on existing capabilities, giving policymakers and economists a rigorous way to measure and predict export basket upgrading rather than relying on case studies alone.

The first formulation of the Economic Complexity Index appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It measured the productive capabilities of economies by treating the knowledge available in a location as the average knowledge of the activities present there, with a product-side counterpart in the Product Complexity Index. This gave analysts a quantitative basis for judging whether a country's export basket was upgrading toward more complex goods.

The programme set targets for shifting the country's manufacturing and export base from low-cost assembly toward advanced sectors including robotics, aerospace, semiconductors and electric vehicles, formalising an explicit state strategy for climbing the value chain.

A government seminar backed by the World Bank-funded Export Competitiveness for Jobs project set out support for leather, footwear, light engineering and plastics, part of a drive toward a $100 billion export target by 2030 and away from over-reliance on the garment sector.

Exports rose 12.6% to nearly $871 million in the first quarter as 155 companies clustered around the Midparc zone near Casablanca shifted into complex components, engineering services and electronics, generating $3 billion in annual revenue and employing 27,000 people.

Harvard's Growth Lab found both economies more complex than their income level would predict, driven by sophisticated and diversified manufacturing, and forecast them to post the fastest per capita growth of any nations over the coming decade.

Agreements with the European Union, Peru and Canada came alongside a push into Central Asia and Africa, part of an effort to broaden destinations beyond traditional partners as the country's total exports rose to $282.91 billion in 2025 from $266.52 billion in 2024.

Lithium exports reached $2.137 billion between January and April 2026, roughly triple the year-earlier value, as new state lithium contracts mandated domestic refining and technology transfer, with cathode material production targeted to eventually earn far more than raw lithium carbonate exports alone.

Policy signals in May 2026 pointed toward process design, local engineering and electrification capabilities, with capacity plans targeting 1.5 million vehicles a year and 80% local integration, backed by a new LFP cathode plant built with South Korean and Chinese partners.

FPT opened an advanced testing and packaging plant in Bac Ninh province and Amkor committed more than $1.6 billion to a nearby facility expected to produce 3.6 billion packaged units a year, extending the country's reach across all six stages of the chip value chain.

Shipments worth around Rs 2.62 lakh crore were led by Apple's iPhone suppliers, including Foxconn, Tata Electronics and Pegatron, as domestic value addition in electronics manufacturing climbed to around 20%, up sharply since the production-linked incentive scheme began in 2020.

The non-oil economy reached 55% of GDP, up from 45% in 2016, as Vision 2030 entered its final phase with 93% of key performance indicators fully or partially met, even though non-oil exports still trailed the programme's own target as a share of non-oil output.

A ban on raw ore exports pushed the export mix from 18% processed materials before 2014 to 99.9% by 2025, with processed nickel exports rising from $1.5 billion to $38.5 billion and giving Indonesia roughly 47% of the global market.