Cyprus
How does Cyprus’s trade profile look? Level of exports and imports over thirty years, structural composition, partner concentration, and the position on the economic-complexity frontier.
Dependency diagnosis
- Portable computers, up to 10 kg (847130): you import 89.9% from China. STRUCTURAL
Structural scarcity, world export HHI 0.51. Switching suppliers will not fix this; the world itself is concentrated (top alternatives: VNM 12.8%, NLD 3.1%, DEU 1.9%, S19 1.8%). Policy: stockpile, substitute the input, or invest in allied/domestic production. - Tricycles, scooters, pedal cars and similar wheeled toys: dolls' carriages: dolls: other toys: reduced-size (scale) models and similar recreational models, working or not: puzzles of all kinds (950300): you import 81.9% from China. UNKNOWN
World concentration unavailable for this product code. - Monitors: other than cathode-ray tube: capable of directly connecting to and designed for use with an automatic data processing machine of heading 84.71 (852852): you import 77.2% from China.
Cyprus: merchandise exports and imports, 1996-2024 (incl. 2025 preliminary)
/macro/CYP page. The short 2024-2025 segment is preliminary, from Cyprus’s own UN Comtrade filing rather than BACI: exports of $6.3B (+12.3% vs 2024) and imports of $15.7B (+15.1%), with both years of the segment on that same as-reported basis. Preliminary Comtrade imports retain the reported valuation (c.i.f. where reported), rather than BACI’s reconciled f.o.b. basis. The separate segments must not be spliced into a single growth series.Query
SELECT year,
SUM(total_exports)*1000 AS exports_usd,
SUM(total_imports)*1000 AS imports_usd,
(SUM(total_exports)-SUM(total_imports))*1000 AS balance_usd
FROM 'data/parquet/country_year_totals.parquet'
WHERE country_code IN (196)
GROUP BY year ORDER BY year;Trade balance, 1996-2024
Export composition
The structural change in what a country exports, from agriculture to manufactures to services, or between HS sections, is one of the most studied transitions in development economics (Imbs & Wacziarg 2003; Hausmann, Hwang & Rodrik 2007). The chart below shows the five largest HS sections of Cyprus’s exports in 2024, plotted back thirty years.
Top-5 HS sections of exports, 1996-2024
Export basket by HS chapter, 2024 · top-30 $5.2B of $5.5B total
Import basket by HS chapter, 2024 · top-30 $12.0B of $14.2B total
Who it sells to
World map of export destinations, 2024
Top 12 export destinations, 2024
What moved exports between years
The line charts above show levels over time; they do not answer the analyst’s next question: when exports changed between 2023 and 2024, which partners and which products accounted for how much of it? The two bridge charts below answer that directly. Contributors are ordered by absolute dollar change, largest first, and every line outside the top 8 is collapsed into one residual bar so the columns still sum exactly to the total move.
Figure 3c. Export change by partner, 2023-2024
Exports moved from $5.8B to $5.5B (−$343.5M).
Scroll horizontally to view the full chart.
Figure 3d. Export change by product, 2023-2024
Exports moved from $5.8B to $5.5B (−$343.5M).
Scroll horizontally to view the full chart.
Economic complexity
The Economic Complexity Index (ECI), building on Hidalgo & Hausmann (2009, PNAS) and formalized as the eigenvalue (second-eigenvector) index in the Atlas of Economic Complexity, ranks countries by the productive knowledge embedded in their export basket. Countries that export many products, and whose products are also exported by few others, score high. ECI is predictive of subsequent income growth and structural transformation; see Hausmann et al. (2014, The Atlas of Economic Complexity, MIT Press) for the full methodology and the comparative country atlas. For a non-linear alternative that ranks fast-diversifying economies differently (China, for instance, sits far higher on fitness than on ECI), compare the Economic Fitness metric of Tacchella et al. (2012).
Cyprus: ECI trajectory, 1996-2024
Export concentration (HHI) and product count, 1996-2024
Effective number of exported products (1/HHI)
Niche leadership
Revealed comparative advantage (Balassa 1965) says a country is specialised in a product when its share of that product’s world exports exceeds the country’s share of all world exports. A stronger version asks: which HS6 lines does the country lead the world in? The table below lists the ten largest export lines (by value) where Cyprus ranks in the world top-5 in 2024, restricted to products with at least US$10M of global trade so tiny niches don’t crowd out economically meaningful positions. This is the “niche leadership” view: products the country is not just diversified in, but competitive at the frontier.
Cyprus: top 10 HS6 lines with world top-5 rank, 2024
Peer countries by structural profile
Which economies share the closest structural profile to Cyprus? Each country is placed in a three-dimensional space of economic complexity (ECI), log GDP per capita, and log total exports, each standardised to zero mean and unit variance in 2024. The five nearest neighbours by Euclidean distance in that space are Cyprus’s closest structural peers, similar on productive-capability, income level, and scale of external trade. This is a trade-specific adaptation of the synthetic-control “donor pool” logic (Abadie, Diamond & Hainmueller 2010).
Cyprus: five closest structural peers, 2024
Margins of export growth
Hummels & Klenow (2005, “The variety and quality of a nation’s exports,” American Economic Review95(3): 704-723) introduced the split of a country’s exports into an extensive margin (the set of goods it ships) and an intensive margin (how much of each). In their own measure the extensive margin is nota raw line count: following Feenstra (1994), each category is weighted by its importance in world trade. The figure below applies a simplified, count-based version of that distinction to one country’s export growth over time, so the levels are a proxy, not the Feenstra-weighted index. The two margins still respond to different levers: trade-cost reductions and discovery push the extensive margin (Melitz 2003), while productivity and demand push the intensive.
Margins of export growth, 2014-2024
Export basket on the complexity frontier
Cyprus: export value vs. product complexity (PCI), 2024
Related
- Value-chain position, domestic vs foreign value added in Cyprus’s exports, VAX ratio, and upstream/downstream index (OECD TiVA)
- Economic Fitness, the non-linear Tacchella-Pietronero complexity ranking, and how it diverges from ECI
- Research index, analytical pieces grounded in BACI flows and gravity covariates
- Sector monitor, quarterly deep dives on 12 HS-defined sectors
- Compare Cyprus against peer economies
- Exporter profile, basket composition, RCA, and partners