Branding Vietnam: A Product Space Analysis of How Export Diversification Can Shape Up the Country’s Sustainable and Innovative Growth

Luong-Thanh Tran and Andreas Freytag

No 11836, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Vietnam’s path to sustainable and innovative growth increasingly depends on how effectively it diversifies and repositions its export portfolio in the global market, or how the country “brand” itself through its exports to the world. Using data from UN Comtrade, we construct the Product Space model for Vietnam, visualizing the relatedness among the products in the country's export basket. Benchmarking against the Product Income Index (PRODY), the Product Gini Index (PGI), and the Product Complexity Index (PCI), we find that Vietnam’s high-volume export products such as garments and textiles are hindering the country’s development goals of sustainable growth, income equality, and innovation. Conversely, Vietnam has been able to export a number of small machine and precision equipment that yield higher added value in terms of sustainability and innovation, but these industries are lacking investment to scale up production. This suggests expansion strategies toward these precision tools and contraction for garments and textiles. Alternative options include radical innovation by shifting production to most knowledge-intensive products Vietnam is producing like cermet tools, or a moderate approach of pursuing export strategies of countries with slightly higher level of development than Vietnam.

Keywords: product space; product complexity; economic complexity; PRODY; PGI; innovation; sustainability; Vietnam export; export diversification; export product targeting; network analysis. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F14 F17 L70 O11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-sea and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp11836.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11836

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().