Open Markets, Complex Exports and Economic Growth: Evidence from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS)

This thesis studies whether international trade openness and the sophistication of a country’s exports (measured by the Economic Complexity Index, ECI) are linked to economic growth in the five original BRICS economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Because only five countries are available, each country is analysed separately using annual data for 1995–2024 from the World Bank and the Atlas of Economic Complexity. The methods are unit-root tests, cointegration tests (ARDL bounds test and Engle–Granger test), growth regressions in first differences, and Toda–Yamamoto causality tests. The main results are as follows. First, no country shows a stable long-run relationship between GDP per capita, trade openness, complexity and investment. Second, in short-run growth regressions, investment is positively linked to growth in all five countries (elasticities between 0.07 and 0.30), while trade openness and complexity are statistically insignificant in every country. Third, trade openness helps to predict growth only in China. The thesis concludes that openness and export complexity should not be treated as reliable drivers of growth in the BRICS on the basis of these data, and that the five economies differ too much for one policy to fit all.