The Export Boom Atlas is there to be used, so we were glad to see Anna Christina Thorsheim put it to work. Her new paper, How to Start Export Booms, asks a question we find hard to put down: can an export boom be started on purpose?
Start with a familiar story. Bangladesh’s garment industry grew out of a partnership in 1979 between the Korean firm Daewoo and Desh Garments, which sent 130 Bangladeshi workers to Korea for training. Those trainees helped seed what became the country’s largest export sector, and today it employs millions of people. Indonesia’s plywood and Colombia’s cut flowers have similar origin stories, each tied to a handful of people who went first.
Anna Christina looked across the more than 80 booms in the Atlas and found that most can be traced back to an identifiable first mover: a foreign firm setting up shop, a local entrepreneur taking a risk, a group of producers deciding to work together. She also finds that the opportunity was often sitting there for a decade or more before anyone acted on it. In her reading, that is what makes the first mover matter.
From there the paper gets practical. It identifies the ways first movers have worked into six types, and argues that two of them, brokering deals with anchor foreign investors and backing local pioneers, are the ones outsiders could most realistically support. It then draws four lessons for anyone who wants to try. Picking the right product is risky, so something closer to a venture fund, placing many bets, could work better. Connecting new producers to buyers early lowers the risk. Local knowledge is hard to replace with data. And the quality of the founder matters a great deal.
The paper ends with six organisational ideas that foundations, entrepreneurs and firms could start building today, from a pioneer fund to a network of scouts on the ground.
Our own work is with governments, and Anna Christina’s focus is on what others could do alongside them. We think it is a useful question to put on the table, and we would like to hear what you make of it.
Explore the Export Boom Atlas: exportbooms.org
The views in the paper are the author’s own.
About the author: Anna Christina Thorsheim is Founding Partner of Elevate Philanthropy and Co-Founder and former Executive Director of Family Empowerment Media. She holds a Master of Public Administration in International Development from the Harvard Kennedy School.