Ricardo Hausmann again questions the prevailing wisdom with respect to growth.
He says one of the standard growth mantras is value addition. Take a raw material and add value to it. But growth comes from identifying innovation around those raw materials.
Poor countries export raw materials such as cocoa, iron ore, and raw diamonds. Rich countries export – often to those same poor countries – more complex products such as chocolate, cars, and jewels. If poor countries want to get rich, they should stop exporting their resources in raw form and concentrate on adding value to them. Otherwise, rich countries will get the lion’s share of the value and all of the good jobs.
Poor countries could follow the example of South Africa and Botswana and use their natural wealth to force industrialization by restricting the export of minerals in raw form (a policy known locally as “beneficiation”). But should they?
Some ideas are worse than wrong: they are castrating, because they interpret the world in a way that emphasizes secondary issues – say, the availability of raw materials – and blinds societies to the more promising opportunities that may lie elsewhere.
He discusses the case of Finland:
Consider Finland, a Nordic country endowed with many trees for its small population. A classical economist would argue that, given this, the country should export wood, which Finland has done. By contrast, a traditional development economist would argue that it should not export wood; instead, it should add value by transforming the wood into paper or furniture – something that Finland also does. But all wood-related products represent barely 20% of Finland’s exports.
The reason is that wood opened up a different and much richer path to development. As the Finns were chopping wood, their axes and saws would become dull and break down, and they would have to be repaired or replaced. This eventually led them to become good at producing machines that chop and cut wood.
Finnish businessmen soon realized that they could make machines that cut other materials, because not everything that can be cut is made out of wood. Next, they automated the machines that cut, because cutting everything by hand can become boring. From here, they went into other automated machines, because there is more to life than cutting, after all. From automated machines, they eventually ended up in Nokia. Today, machines of different types account for more than 40% of Finland’s goods exports.
The moral of the story is that adding value to raw materials is one path to diversification, but not necessarily a long or fruitful one. Countries are not limited by the raw materials they have. After all, Switzerland has no cocoa, and China does not make advanced memory chips. That has not prevented these countries from taking a dominant position in the market for chocolate and computers, respectively.
Interesting bit as always from Prof Hausmann..
Mostly Economics 
