Export Growth, Economic Growth, and Development Levels: An Empirical Analysis

The export‐promotion development strategy has been advocated as a generally valid prescription for economic growth on the basis of econometric studies of the exports‐growth relationships. A prominent shortcoming of these studies is in the presupposition, intrinsic to them, that exports‐growth relationships hold similarly for all developing countries. This paper tests the hypothesis that the exports‐growth relationships vary with the developing countries' level of development. My results indicate that high export growth is most beneficial to developing countries at intermediate stages of their development cycle, and consequently suggest that the export‐promotion development strategy is especially appropriate only for these countries. 1994 The Ohio State University