New Economist: Rodrik: It's what you export that matters
リンク: New Economist: Rodrik: It's what you export that matters.
Rodrik: It's what you export that matters
Why do countries produce what they do, and does it matter? How much should they specialise, and to what extend does that reflect their endowments of physical and human capital, labor, and natural resources? A new paper by Ricardo Hausmann and Dani Rodrik from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, It Is Not How Much But What You Export That Matters (PDF), seeks to answer those questions. Here's the plain English summary and conclusion:
We argue in this paper that specialization patterns are partly indeterminate and may be shaped by idiosyncratic elements. While fundamentals play an important role, they do not uniquely pin down what a country will produce and export. Furthermore, not all good are alike in terms of their conseqences for economic performance. Specializing in some products will bring higher growth than specializing in others. In this setting, government policy has a potentially important positive role to play in shaping the production structure.
...What we have shown in this paper is that there are economically meaningful differences in the specialization patterns of otherwise similar countries. We have captured these differences by developing an index that measures the "quality" of countries' export baskets. We provided evidence that shows that countries that latch on to a set of goods that are placed higher on this quality spectrum tend to perform better. The clear implication is that the gains from globalization depend on the ability of countries to appropriately position themselves along this spectrum.
And the gotta-impress-the-journal editor abstract:
When local cost discovery generates knowledge spillovers, specialization patterns become partly indeterminate and the mix of goods that a country produces may have important implications for economic growth. We demonstrate this proposition formally and adduce some empirical sup- port for it. We construct an index of the "income level of a country's exports, document its properties, and show that it predicts subsequent economic growth.
