Desempenho economico: upgrading exportacoes

Um importante artigo sobre export performance e ganhos de produtividade:

Rodrik, Dani, R. Hausmann, and J. Hwang:
What You Export Matters
Journal of Economic Growth 12, no. 1 (March 2007): 1-25

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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 support 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.

1 Introduction
Why do countries produce what they do, and does it matter? The conventional approach to these questions is driven by what we might call the “fundamentals” view of the world. In this view, a country’s fundamentals—namely its endowments of physical and human capital, labor, and natural resources along with the overall quality of its institutions—determine relative costs and the patterns of specialization that go with them. Attempts to reshape the production structure beyond the boundaries set by these fundamentals are likely to fail and hamper economic performance.
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We do not claim any novelty for the idea that specialization patterns are not entirely predictable. It has long been understood that Switzerland’s prowess in watches, say, or Belgium’s in chocolates cannot be explained by the normal forces of comparative advantage. To resolve such puzzles, economists have long relied on models with increasing returns to scale, network effects, technological spillovers, thick-market externalities, or some combination thereof.1 The idea that specializing in some goods is more growth promoting than specializing in others is not new either. In models with learning-by-doing externalities, long run growth tends to become endogenous and depends on economic structure and the rate at which it is being transformed.2
Endogenous growth models based on learning spillovers have been difficult to test empirically because we do not have good estimates on (or strong priors about) which types of goods are more likely to generate such spillovers.
In our framework production indeterminacy maps into economic performance in a straightforward and empirically verifiable way. Everything else being the same, countries that specialize in the types of goods that rich countries export are likely to grow faster than countries that specialize in other goods. Rich countries are those that have latched on to “rich-country products,” while countries that continue to produce “poorcountry” goods remain poor. Countries become what they produce. The novelty in our framework is that it establishes a particular hierarchy in goods space that is both amenable to empirical measurement and has determinate growth implications.

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4 Concluding remarks
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.

Informação e texto "pescados" em: http://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/node/3508