An interesting working paper from the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard by Christian Ketels of the World Bank. The subtle argument being made is that policies which target competitiveness improvements will achieve greater prosperity growth – and will increase exports – more than policies which target export growth directly.
There is actually quite a lot of emerging consensus on the need to look at the fundamental drivers that lead to higher exports rather than targeting exports directly.
In policy setting there is always a risk of over-emphasis on the variables that can be measured even though these are often at times only intermediate objectives.