Digital Connectivity, Economic Complexity and the Shock Specificity of Export Resilience

Whether broad structural capabilities make national exports resilient across qualitatively different global crises remains uncertain. This study compares export resistance during the 2008–2009 global financial crisis and the 2020 pandemic across a broad international sample using annual real merchandise export volume. Resistance is measured as the gap between realized log export volume in the shock year and a no-shock benchmark extrapolated from each country's preceding export trend. Pre-shock internet use measures digital connectivity and the economic complexity index captures productive capabilities. Cross-sectional regressions assess their individual and joint associations while controlling for income, population, trade openness, and region. The results show no robust resilience premium from internet connectivity, economic complexity, or their interaction across both shocks. Among 139 economies observed in both episodes, export-resistance rankings are only weakly related, with a Pearson correlation of 0.141 and a Spearman correlation of 0.059. Excluding 2008 from the financial-crisis counterfactual leaves this conclusion unchanged. Simple structural models also have limited predictive content within each crisis and do not improve when transported across crises. The evidence therefore supports a shock-contingent interpretation of aggregate export resilience and cautions against treating broad national indicators as universal buffers.