resource-based development; productive capabilities; complementarity; critical rung; economic complexity; productivity; global value chains.

This paper proposes the National Competitiveness Ladder as a framework for analyzing the transformation of natural-resource-based rents into accumulable productive, technological and knowledge capabilities. The model distinguishes five national capabilities: human capital (H), governance (G), infrastructure (I), financial capacity (F ), and technology and innovation (C). A constant elasticity of substitution (CES) function formalizes the possible complementarity among them, while the critical rung, k∗, identifies the dimension with the lowest normalized value. The empirical test uses an unbalanced panel for 1996–2022. With country and year fixed effects, the geometric capabilities index shows a positive association with the HS92 Economic Complexity Index (coefficient 0.263; country-clustered standard error 0.087; p = 0.003; N = 1,546; 118 countries; exploratory specification, withoutlag). No statistically significant association is found with the Penn World Table total factor productivity measures. The reduced-form CES profile is sensitive to specification and does not identify a structural elasticity of substitution; therefore, complementarity is not demonstrated. The proxy that most frequently takes the minimum normalized value in the sample is R&D/GDP (31.8%), followed by access to electricity (30.9%) and private credit/GDP (23.4%), a descriptive result that depends on the indicators and the normalization. The tests on sectoral accumulation (P2), response to commodity shocks (P3) and product diversification (P4) are presented as pending hypotheses, not as findings. The contribution of this version is conceptual and narrowly empirical: it defines a falsifiable framework, documents the associations that can be reproduced, and establishes the data conditions required for a later evaluation.