An analysis of the competitiveness of developing countries based on the foreign added value of exports: the use of revealed comparative advantage index for the period 1995 to 2018

Abstract

The objective of this article is to contribute to the improvement of a more comprehensive approach to international competitiveness, from the attempt to construct a revealed comparative advantages index that considers not only the participation of economies in the world market from the perspective of exports, but also the importance of value-added of exports and, in a broader sense, decentralization of world production, for the construction and maintenance of oligopolistic positions of industries and countries. For this, we used data from the TiVA database, in the period between 1995 and 2018, focusing on two groups of developing countries: BRICS and ASEAN.