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Three Asian exporters grew dramatically over thirty years. One became one of the most sophisticated economies on Earth. One grew faster than almost any country in history yet stayed below the world average in complexity. One grew its exports 12.5x and its complexity rank actually fell. The lesson, written in the data, is that exporting more is not the same as developing.
The Economic Complexity Index (ECI) of Hidalgo and Hausmann ranks economies by the diversity and sophistication of what they can competitively export. It is not a measure of how much a country sells, but of how hard to copy its export basket is. Ranked against a field that grew from 213 economies in 1995 to 226 in 2024, our three protagonists went in three different directions. South Korea climbed from 53th to 2nd. Vietnam rose from 196th to 141st, real progress, but it remains in the bottom half. Bangladesh fell from 198th to 218th.
ECI rank by year. Korea climbs toward the top; Vietnam improves but stays mid-table; Bangladesh drifts down. Rank is measured against 213 economies in 1995 and 226 in 2024.
Reading the chart: the axis puts rank #1 at the top, so higher on the chart means more complex. Korea sits near the top and stays there, Vietnam climbs from the bottom toward the middle, and Bangladesh drifts lower over time.
Plot export growth against the change in complexity rank and the three economies separate cleanly. South Korea grew its exports 6.0x (from $128.1B to $764.0B) and climbed 51 places. Vietnam grew an extraordinary 93.3x (from $5.4B to $505.2B) and climbed 55 places, gaining on volume but not yet on sophistication. Bangladesh grew 12.5x (from $4.7B to $58.8B) and lost 20 places. Growth and development are not the same axis.
Net places gained on the ECI ladder over the period, with each country's export growth multiple in the label. Korea and Vietnam climbed; Bangladesh fell 20 places despite 12.5x export growth.
The mechanism is visible in what each country actually sells. South Korea's largest 2024 export is integrated circuits, the single most complex traded product, followed by refined fuels, cars and telecoms equipment, a diversified, hard-to-copy basket. Vietnam's top lines are phones, computer parts and chips: modern products, though much of the value is assembly of imported components. Bangladesh's four largest exports are all cotton apparel. Growth came from doing more of the same simple thing, and the complexity score reflects it.
Korea's basket is led by integrated circuits, a high-complexity, diversified mix.
Vietnam's basket is electronics-led but assembly-heavy.
Every one of Bangladesh's four largest exports is cotton apparel, a low-complexity concentration.
Complexity is not an academic curiosity. The diversity and sophistication of a country's export basket is one of the best available predictors of future growth, because complex capabilities are the platform from which a country reaches adjacent, higher-value products. A country that grows by deepening a single low-complexity sector can raise incomes for a time, but it accumulates fewer of the capabilities that make the nexttransition possible. Korea's ascent and Bangladesh's slide are the two ends of that logic. Vietnam sits in between: the volumes have arrived, the question is whether the capabilities follow.
Source. Trade data is CEPII BACI at HS6, HS 1992 nomenclature, 1995 to 2024. The Economic Complexity Index is computed in-house on this same BACI corpus using the reflections method of Hidalgo and Hausmann (2009), so the ECI series and the trade series are internally consistent. Export totals are BACI country aggregates in thousands of US dollars, converted to dollars for display and verified against known national figures.
Method. For each country we read its ECI rank in 1995 and 2024 against the full ranked field that year, its total export value in both years (the growth multiple), and its largest export products in 2024. Rank is reported against the contemporaneous field (213 economies in 1995, 226 in 2024) because complexity rank is only meaningful relative to peers.
Caveats.ECI is model-derived and vendor-specific; compare only within this dataset's own series, not across providers. BACI reports gross trade, so for assembly-heavy exporters like Vietnam the value overstates domestic content, which is one reason gross export growth and complexity can diverge. The latest BACI year is subject to revision.
Related reading: export diversification and growth, premature deindustrialization, and quality ladders.