Export booms happen more often than you think

Introducing the Export Boom Atlas

How do developing countries structurally transform their economies to move up the income ladder? One of the most common, and most powerful, pathways has been through growing and diversifying exports. 

Connecting to global export markets has underpinned many of the most successful economic development stores of the past three decades. Bangladesh’s garment industry transformed from a small assembly operation in the 1990s into an engine of the country’s growth, today employing 4 million workers, 80% women. India’s IT sector, nascent at the turn of the millenium, scaled rapidly to meet global outsourcing demands, creating millions of formal jobs. 

Across most cases of rapid structural transformation—from the Asian Tigers to the rise of China and Vietnam—export growth, both in scale and complexity, has played a central role.

Why are exports so important? 

Exports have proven to be a powerful driver of sustained economic growth because they allow developing countries to access larger global markets that dwarf domestic demand, enabling businesses to unlock economies of scale. 

Global competition also pushes firms to learn, upgrade, and innovate, raising their productivity. For governments, export growth enables them to earn foreign currency reserves that help stabilize economies and guard against external shocks. 

Take Kenya’s floriculture sector. By specializing in cut flowers for global markets, Kenya can produce billions of individual rose stems each year, far more than domestic consumers could absorb or afford at premium international prices. Now the EU’s top flower supplier, the sector was able to grow with economies of scale to become the country’s third-largest foreign exchange earner, employing 150,000 Kenyans.  

Export booms are not rare miracles

As global trade shifts and traditional development paths narrow, understanding what drives export success has never mattered more. 

However, in development circles export-led growth is still often discussed as the result of “miracles”–implying something mysterious, exceptional, or dependent on luck. A few famous examples, like garments in Bangladesh, IT services in India, or electronics in Vietnam, are widely acknowledged. But even in these well-known cases, the underlying playbooks–the key government leaders, industrial policies, anchor investors, and external actors–are far less understood.

Meanwhile, dozens of equally impressive export booms remain almost unknown, even within the development community. This lack of awareness reinforces the belief that rapid export growth is exceptional or out of reach for most countries.

To challenge that assumption, Growth Teams has created the Export Boom Atlas, a new project that identifies, maps, and profiles major export booms in low and middle income countries since 1995. 

How we built the Atlas

Using data from UN Comtrade, we identified cases of rapid export growth by comparing export performance globally for each country in each sector across two benchmark years (1995 and 2022). We included the case if a country: 

• Improved at least 15 places in global export rankings in a given sector from 1995 to 2022 (demonstrating significant growth), and 

• Attained a final ranking of 60th or better in 2022 (demonstrating significant international competitiveness). 

Some well-known successes do not appear on this map either because they were already ranked highly by 1995 (as is the case for China) or because they were already a high-income country (as is the case for the UAE). 

From this methodology, we identified 82 cases of rapid export growth in 42 developing countries since 1995 across 9 sectors: stones (16), textiles (11), vehicles (11), electronics (9), agriculture (8), chemicals (8), metals (7), machinery (6), and services (6). 

For each case, we developed a detailed qualitative case study to understand the playbook for success, focusing on the contribution of the public sector, private sector, and external factors in driving export growth. 

What the Atlas reveals

The Export Boom Atlas demonstrates that export booms are far more common than prevailing development narratives suggest. They happen across sectors and regions, often reshaping industries and livelihoods. 

Consider a few examples from the 80+ cases:

While Bangladesh's textile sector is more well known, Cambodia’s textile sector has created nearly one million jobs, 80% women, since 1995 as textile exports grew from less than 2% of GDP to nearly a third by 2022. 

While India’s IT success story is better known, India’s pharmaceutical exports also grew by 20-fold since 1995, now employing 2.7 million people.

While Africa is often written off as unsuitable for complex manufacturing, Morocco has become the largest vehicle exporter to the EU by value. The country’s automotive sector expanded from less than 0.1% of GDP in 1995 to over 20% by 2022, creating some 200,000 jobs.

These are just a small sampling of the 80+ cases mapped and documented on Growth Team’s Export Boom Atlas. They serve as a reminder that export growth is not only possible as an idea, but is a reality that has been achieved all over the world in the last three decades.

Transformation isn’t a miracle. There are dozens of playbooks we can learn from. 

What did we learn from studying 80+ export booms in developing countries? Follow Growth Teams on LinkedIn and X as we share a series of blogs and posts in the coming weeks about our key takeaways.