Income per capita in Uganda has doubled in the last 20 years. This remarkable performance has been buoyed by significant aid flows and large external imbalances. Economic growth has been concentrated in non-tradable activities leading to growing external imbalances and a growing gap between...

Ricardian theories of production often take the comparative advantage of locations in different industries to be uncorrelated. They are seen as the outcome of the realization of a random extreme value distribution. These theories do not take a stance regarding the counterfactual or implied...

In this paper we examine the product space and its consequences for the process of structural transformation. We argue that the assets and capabilities needed to produce one good are imperfect substitutes for those needed to produce other goods, but the degree of asset specificity varies widely....

In this paper we document that the probability that a product is added to a country's export basket is, on average, 65% larger if a neighboring country is a successful exporter of that same product. We interpret our result as evidence of international intra-industry knowledge diffusion. Our...

We show that world trade network datasets contain empirical evidence that the dynamics of innovation in the world economy follows indeed the concept of creative destruction, as proposed by J.A. Schumpeter more than half a century ago. National economies can be viewed as complex, evolving...

Decades of research in ecology have shown that nestedness is a ubiquitous characteristic of both, biological and economic ecosystems. The dynamics of nestedness, however, have rarely been observed. Here we show that the nestedness of both, the network connecting countries to the products that...

Countries differ markedly in the diversification of their exports. Products differ in the number of countries that export them, which we define as their ubiquity. We document a new stylized fact in the global pattern of exports: there is a systematic relationship between the diversification of a...

The literature on knowledge diffusion shows that it decays strongly with distance. In this paper we document that the probability that a product is added to a country's export basket is, on average, 65% larger if a neighboring country is a successful exporter of that same product. For existing...

This paper explores export performance in South Africa over the past 50 years, and concludes that a lagging process of structural transformation is part of the explanation for stagnant exports per capita. Slow structural transformation in South Africa is found to be a consequence of the...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze Colombia's experiences with and opportunities for export led growth. We first review Colombia's growth and export performance over the past 30 years and find that the country is indeed facing an export challenge. We then go on to develop new metrics and...