What Sparks an Export Boom? Lessons from 80+ Success Stories
Export Booms: Neither Magic nor Mystery
Observers of economic development often search for a “silver bullet” that can explain why some countries achieve rapid growth while others do not. Others take the opposite view, seeing successful economic development as largely a matter of luck, geography, or historical circumstance, with little that can be replicable from one country to another.
Rather than treating export success–a key element of economic progress–as either mystery or fate, we examined 82 real cases of rapid export growth to understand what governments, businesses, and external partners actually did to create change.
To uncover the playbooks behind the 82 export booms in the Export Boom Atlas, we profiled each case across the same core drivers: the role of the public sector (policy choices and key government actors), the private sector (pioneering firms and industrial growth), and external factors (global market factors and trade patterns).
The case studies in the Export Boom Atlas demonstrate that there is no single recipe for success, but rather a set of proven playbooks to learn from. Each combines public leadership, private initiative, and external catalysts. In most cases, it is the confluence of pivotal decisions, investments, and conditions that ultimately drives transformation.
Pivotal Actions and Turning Points
While many factors contribute to export booms, behind many cases lies a pivotal individual or decision that tipped the balance–demonstrating that transformation does not emerge by luck alone, it can and has been created.
Consider a few examples:
For Morocco’s success in car exports–jumping from $29 million to $7 billion in under three decades–entrepeneurial policy-makers proved critical. A coalition of actors–including the Ministry of Industry, Invest in Morocco, and private sector leaders–worked together to identify and unblock bottlenecks, earning the moniker “Team Maroc.” The modernization mandate of King Muhammad VI (MVI), Prime Minister Driss Jettou’s experience in the trade and finance ministries, and Jettou’s close personal relationship with the CEO of French auto-giant Renault were pivotal to the country’s successful automotive strategy. After securing a mammoth $1.4 billion investment from Renault in 2007, the company became Morocco’s largest private employer, with its factory in Tangier becoming Renault’s largest plant in the world.
In Bangladesh, Desh Garments played that pivotal role as an anchor firm. Its partnership with the South Korean Daewoo Corporation and training of 130 workers in South Korea seeded the skills and know-how that launched Bangladesh’s now world-leading ready-made garment (RMG) sector. The know-how from Desh-connected alumni catalyzed sector-wide growth, as by 1984, nearly 300 RMG firms had emerged, three-quarters founded by Desh alumni. These Desh-connected firms proved more productive than their peers, spreading tacit knowledge and expertise that helped Bangladesh become the world’s second-largest exporter of ready-made garments.
These examples illustrate that a specific investment or government strategy can tip the balance and transform a nascent sector into an export powerhouse. Luck alone does not create export booms.
When Action Meets The Moment
While decisive actors and strategic choices often play an outsized role, export booms rarely hinge on a single moment. Instead, they emerge when industry-specific efforts to overcome constraints to growth align with market opportunities. Public and private actors shape these openings, but some conditions, such as shifts in global demand or technological breakthroughs, arise beyond any one country’s control and create windows that call for timely action.
In many cases, success requires multiple forces pulling together: purposeful action by governments and firms, amplified by favorable global dynamics when those actors are ready to seize the moment.
Take the case of Indonesia, which grew its metal exports from $2 billion in 1995 to $40 billion in 2022, powered by its move up the value chain from mining unprocessed nickel ore to producing higher-value battery-grade processed nickel.
How did Indonesia achieve its nickel boom? Countries looking to replicate their model have primarily focused on its resource nationalization policies, including its 2010 law mandating divestment of foreign mining concessions to local firms and its 2014 ban on unprocessed nickel and bauxite ore exports. However, our case study of Indonesia’s metals sector demonstrates that these industrial policies were only one factor that enabled the success of Indonesia’s nickel processing industry.
Indonesia benefited from robust growth in global nickel demand, combined with technological shifts that made nickel processing cheaper, geopolitical factors that deepened Chinese investment amidst the expansion of the Belt and Road Initiative, and mutually reinforcing economic motives of Chinese nickel conglomerates seeking to diversify their supply chains.
Moreover, Indonesia’s nationalization policies were carefully synchronized with significant fiscal (e.g. tax exemptions, reduced import duties) and non-fiscal incentives (e.g. simplifying bureaucratic process, enhancing infrastructure, support for land acquisition) to catalyze investment in nickel processing.
Indonesia’s nickel success thus demonstrates that export booms are driven neither by a silver bullet nor by circumstance alone. The nickel boom was underpinned by President Joko Widodo’s unrelenting push for domestic value addition, including through the enforcement of the export ban on raw ore, but also could not have been achieved without favorable shifts in the geopolitical and market environment and carefully synchronized improvements in the enabling and regulatory environment.
Success, therefore, often requires many factors coming together, as countries and firms exploit openings caused by favorable global shifts.
The Supporting Role External Partners Can Play
External partners–including aid agencies and philanthropists–rightly ask how they can meaningfully contribute to accelerating industrialization and export growth, given the many forces at work.
Our Atlas of 82 export booms demonstrates that when partners target specific pain points within export-ready sectors–from financing key public goods to helping tailor appropriate regulations–their support can be catalytic.
In Poland, for example, as recently as the 1990s, poultry farms were low-tech, small-scale, largely family-run operations producing small flocks for local consumption. By 2022, Poland became the EU’s largest chicken producer and third-largest poultry exporter globally, with the agricultural sector growing 15-fold since 1995.
This success would not have been possible without the support of the European Union (EU). EU accession enabled duty-free access to the EU's common market, which became the destination of three quarters of Poland's agricultural exports. Direct EU funding through the Common Agricultural Policy enabled a transition from raw agricultural goods to processed food products that could meet EU agricultural standards, enhancing product quality and competitiveness.
In Costa Rica, the US government similarly helped lay the foundation for later success in the medical device sector, which today makes up more than two-fifths of all exports. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) played a key enabling role by supporting Costa Rica’s early industrial upgrading and workforce development in the 1990s and 2000s. USAID’s technical assistance and funding helped establish training programs, improve regulatory standards, and create the skilled labor pool needed for high-tech manufacturing. This policy support laid the groundwork for Costa Rica to attract and retain leading global medical technology investors, foster public-private partnerships, and build a world-class medical device export ecosystem.
The EU’s support to Polish poultry and USAID’s support of Costa Rican industrialization demonstrate that donors do have a key role to play in bringing capital and expertise that can plug key gaps in export-focused sectors. The buy-in, and coordination, of government, however, is a critical factor in enabling external assistance to successfully contribute to structural transformation.
Such government buy-in and coordination may help explain the success of these interventions in Poland and Costa Rica. In Poland, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development coordinated closely with the EU to implement agricultural policies that supported modernization and compliance with EU standards. In Costa Rica, the Investment Promotion Agency (CINDE) worked to attract foreign direct investment in the medical device sector by clearly bureaucratic hurdles and offering incentives to investors.
The Pattern Behind 80+ Export Booms
The record shows that there is no secret recipe for export success, nor do export booms arise solely from favorable global circumstances. Export booms take shape when governments, firms, and partners work in concert to implement targeted policies and accelerate anchor investments, taking advantage of global openings.