examining the specific role that the commodity boom had on their diversification performance over the last decade, both along the product and the market dimension.

With systematically positive net exports of minerals and natural resources per capita, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan appear to be resource rich, and, less diversified than their relatively resource poor neighbors Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Kyrgyz Republic and Ukraine.

The relative concentration of export bundles of the resource-abundant countries of ECA also holds when performing a wide international comparison. Results from a cross-country analysis linking average diversification performances for 171 countries over the period 2000-2011 with natural resource abundance, level of economic development and size of the labor force suggest that the resource rich countries from ECA exhibit more concentrated export bundles than countries with similar relevant characteristics, while the opposite is true for those relatively poorer in resources.

Abundance in natural resources is not only associated with the _level_ of diversification. For ECA countries, the combination of resource abundance with a commodity price boom during the second half of the last decade was also associated with relatively weaker _changes_ in diversification, when compared to the non-resource abundant countries. While resource poor countries of the region increased the number of products exported over the period 2000-2011, the same did not hold for the resource rich. In addition, this latter group increased its export basket concentration as measured by the Herfindahl Index, its dependence on its 5 most important products, and its share of services in total exports. Along the market dimension, empirical evidence suggests that the commodity boom also affected export diversification performance, although to a lower extent than it affected diversification along the product dimension. While resource poor countries, on average, penetrated eight new markets, implying an increase of roughly 15 percent on the number of destinations reached, resource rich countries did not increase the breadth of export destinations significantly during the period.

Then the focus was shifted to export performance. Overall, as a general message, when oil and gas exports are excluded, the export dynamism in ECA countries’ most important products seems to have been outpaced, almost systematically, by that of the rest of the world, implying that often, these countries have lost global market shares in their top exportable products.

As it is typically found in the literature, most of export growth for the relatively larger economies of the region was explained by selling more of the same products to the same partners, that is, with little role for diversification, while for relatively smaller economies, diversification, mainly along the market dimension, explained a larger portion of growth. Then we looked specifically at how ECA countries performed in penetrating the dynamic markets in East Asia Pacific – the fastest growing region in the world, both in terms of the amount of exports to these destinations, and in terms of the type of exports. In particular, if the increased trade implied more exports of the same goods to the same partners or if it implied diversification either along the product dimension or along the market dimension. With the exception of Ukraine and Kyrgyz Republic, all countries in the ECA region increased export exposure to EAP. The pattern of export growth with EAP showed similarities and differences with the pattern of 21