Does Tunisia export High-Tech?

TUNESS Chart of the Week (27/05/2013)

In this weekly note, the Tunisian high technology exports (as a percentage of manufactured exports) are investigated. The high technology exports, a world bank indicator, is defined as all products with high research and development intensity, such as  aerospace, computers, pharmaceuticals, scientific instruments, and electrical machinery. Being able to export high-tech products requires skilled employees (with high level of education and appropriate training) as well as decent level of international competitiveness to conquer new segments in the international market. 

Figure 1: High-tech exports rate and R&D expenditure (% of GDP) for Tunisia

The apparent trendiness of the high-tech exports rate is accompanied by a clear increase in research and development expenditure (% of GDP). The latter has doubled from 2000 to 2009.

Further investigation may dig into the nature of generating process of this indicator, namely it stationarity property⁽¹⁾. It would be interesting to unveil whether this process is trend-stationary or non-stationary (with probably some unit root property), and how it relates to the economic growth. 

Figure 2: High-tech exports rate for the MENA region countries

Compared to countries from the MENA region, Tunisia is among the top three high-tech exporters (as percentage of manufactured exports) from 2009-2011 with Lebanon and Morocco, as it can be depicted from Figure 2. It is worth noting however the negligible% of the high technology exports for the oil exporting countries. 

Figure 3: High-tech exports rate for the top 10 economies

From Figure 3, it could be easily inferred that six among the top ten economies of the world have high-tech exports rate between 15% and 25% (USA, China, Japan, Germany, France and UK). Brazil, Russia, Italy and India export between 5% and 12 % of high tech from their total manufactured exports.