Topics in Middle Eastern and North African Economies

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

5-1-2020

Abstract

Economic development is the process of structural transformation as countries’ economic structure diversify from agriculture and manufacturing to service sector. In order to ensure this transformation, and hence, stable growth, economies should upgrade their productive structure, moving from lower to higher value-added products. Developing countries may use the advantage of being the follower, i.e., learning know-how and spillover effects to transform the production facility to higher sophistication levels. Open economic structure further increases diffusion of technology from the developed world. However, exporting more sophisticated products is another level together with the competition in the global markets. Specialization on some specific products may provide productivity whereas some may not which highlights the importance of good governance by choosing optimal policies. An index for the product complexity (PCI) is designed by Hausmann et al. (2011) that calculates the knowledge intensity of a product by considering the knowledge intensity of its exporters. In the same manner, economic complexity index (ECI) measures the knowledge intensity of an economy by considering the knowledge intensity of the products it exports. These annual indices enables country and product comparisons in terms of complexity and hence provides information for policy-makers. This study measures export sophistication for Middle East and North African countries (MENA) to make a comparison between region countries for the period of 2004-2016. We also examine the effect on export sophistication on economic growth for MENA region and confirm Hausmann et al. (2007) that export goods associated with higher productivity grow more. T

Journal Title

Topics in Middle Eastern and North African Economies

ISSN

2334-282X

Publisher

Middle East Economic Association and Loyola University Chicago

Volume

22

Issue

1

Comments

Presentation of the articles in the Topics in Middle Eastern and North African Economies was made possible by a limited license granted to Loyola University Chicago and Middle East Economics Association from the authors who have retained all copyrights in the articles.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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