How does USSR (...1990)’s trade profile look? Level of exports and imports over thirty years, structural composition, partner concentration, and the position on the economic-complexity frontier.
Figure 1
USSR (...1990): merchandise exports and imports, 1995-2024
No data available for this chart.
Source: CEPII BACI 202501 (retrieved 2026-04-28), f.o.b. exports and c.i.f. imports, summed across all reporters.Figure 1b
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 USSR (...1990)’s exports in 2024, plotted back thirty years.
Figure 2
Top-5 HS sections of exports, 1995-2024
No data available for this chart.
In 2024, the top three HS sections account for 0% of merchandise exports that map to an HS92 section, a rough measure of sectoral concentration at the coarsest classification level. Shares here are over BACI exports that carry a valid HS92 section mapping, so the five-section series does not sum to 100% of total exports: some HS6 codes (newer HS revisions, non-standard codes) fall outside the 21-section mapping. Note that the top-5 sections are selected by 2024 share, so a section that was dominant in 1995 but has since fallen out of the top 5 will not appear on the chart.
Source: CEPII BACI 202501 (retrieved 2026-04-28) crossed with HS92 section codes. Shares are over the HS6-mapped universe; HS6 codes without an HS92 section fall outside the 21-section totals.Figure 2b
Export basket by HS chapter, 2024 · top-0 $0
No data available for this chart.
No HS chapter export data for 2024.
Source: CEPII BACI 202501 (retrieved 2026-04-28), f.o.b. exports of HS6 codes aggregated to HS2 chapters, 2024. Restricted to top 30 chapters by value.Figure 2c
Import basket by HS chapter, 2024 · top-0 $0
No data available for this chart.
No HS chapter import data for 2024.
Source: CEPII BACI 202501 (retrieved 2026-04-28), c.i.f. imports of HS6 codes aggregated to HS2 chapters, 2024. Restricted to top 30 chapters by value.
Who it sells to
Figure 3a
World map of export destinations, 2024
Figure 3b
Top 12 export destinations, 2024
No data available for this chart.
Partner concentration measures market exposure. The single largest destination absorbs -% of USSR (...1990)’s exports; the top 3 together take 0%. Concentrated partner bases make bilateral shocks (trade wars, recessions) first-order.
Source: CEPII BACI 202501 (retrieved 2026-04-28), bilateral exports 2024. Shares are over total exports.
Economic complexity
The Economic Complexity Index (ECI) of Hidalgo & Hausmann (2009, PNAS) 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.
Figure 4a
USSR (...1990): ECI trajectory, 1995-2024
No data available for this chart.
No ECI series for this country.
Method: Hidalgo & Hausmann (2009) “The Building Blocks of Economic Complexity” PNAS 106(26): 10570-10575. Applied to BACI RCA matrix.Figure 4b
Export concentration (HHI) and product count, 1995-2024
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 USSR (...1990) 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.
Figure 5
USSR (...1990): top 10 HS6 lines with world top-5 rank, 2024
No data available for this chart.
USSR (...1990) does not currently rank in the world top-5 exporters of any HS6 line above the US$10M threshold in 2024.
Source: CEPII BACI 202501 (retrieved 2026-04-28), HS6 exporter rankings, 2024. Restricted to products with ≥ US$10M world trade. Method: Balassa (1965) RCA taken to its rank-based extreme, top-5 world rank is a stringent specialisation test.
Peer countries by structural profile
Which economies share the closest structural profile to USSR (...1990)? 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 USSR (...1990)’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).
Figure 6
USSR (...1990): five closest structural peers, 2024
No data available for this chart.
Insufficient coverage across ECI, WDI GDP-pc, and BACI exports for USSR (...1990) to identify structural peers.
Method: z-score each dimension (ECI, log GDP-pc, log total exports) across the universe of countries with all three observations in the latest year; rank by Euclidean distance. Abadie, Diamond & Hainmueller (2010) “Synthetic Control Methods for Comparative Case Studies,” JASA 105(490): 493-505.
Margins of export growth
Hummels & Klenow (2005, “The variety and quality of a nation’s exports,” American Economic Review 95(3): 704-723) decomposed cross-country export growth into the extensive margin (exporting more distinct HS6 lines) and the intensive margin (exporting more value per existing line). The decomposition is informative because the two margins respond to different policy levers: trade-cost reductions and discovery push the extensive margin (Melitz 2003), while productivity and demand push the intensive.
Figure 7
Margins of export growth: extensive vs intensive
Insufficient HHI/product-count history to decompose.
Method: Hummels & Klenow (2005) AER 95(3).
Export basket on the complexity frontier
Figure 8
USSR (...1990): export value vs. product complexity (PCI), 2024
No data available for this chart.
Each dot is one HS6 product in USSR (...1990)’s basket with more than US$1M in exports in 2024 (long-tail marginal exports below that floor are filtered out so the scatter is legible; the filter drops many HS6 codes for small economies and few for large ones). Horizontal = export value (log), vertical = Product Complexity Index (PCI). Dots upper-right are high-value, high-complexity products (machinery, precision instruments). Lower-left products carry less productive knowledge per dollar. A basket shifted toward the upper-right correlates with higher ECI and higher income.
Method: PCI from Hausmann-Hidalgo (2009) spectral-eigenvector decomposition of the country-product RCA matrix. Basket restricted to HS6 exports > US$1M in the latest year.
Related
Research index, analytical pieces grounded in BACI flows and gravity covariates
Sector monitor, quarterly deep dives on 12 HS-defined sectors
Each country is shaded by the bilateral value of USSR (...1990)’s exports to it in 2024, binned into quintiles. USSR (...1990) itself is tinted in amber as the origin; white indicates destinations with no recorded bilateral flow. The map makes regional dependency structures visible, neighbours, former colonial ties, bloc partners, in ways a top-list ordering hides.