Development studies on the middle-income trap have highlighted the challenges for developing economies to transform their productive systems from simple towards high value-added activities. Here, we use trade data of 116 countries to quantify the stages of productive sophistication and reveal the critical phase that countries encounter at intermediate levels of economic sophistication. Our results reveal that only five countries (i.e. Ireland, Israel, Hungary, Singapore, and South Korea) overcame the gravitation towards simple products and fully transformed their economies towards complex products between 1970 and 2010. They successfully made use of windows of opportunities in the digital and electronics sectors through smart industrial policies that promoted endogenous skills and access to international knowledge sources. In contrast, countries like Brazil or South Africa still struggle with the gravitation towards simple economic activities, social fragmentation, and a lack of coherent industrial policies.

对中等收入陷阱的发展研究突显了发展中经济体将其生产系统从简单的活动转变为高附加值的活动所面临的挑战。在这里，我们使用116个国家/地区的贸易数据来量化生产复杂性的阶段，并揭示各国在中等水平的经济复杂性上遇到的关键阶段。我们的结果表明，在1970年至2010年之间，只有五个国家（即爱尔兰，以色列，匈牙利，新加坡和韩国）克服了对简单产品的依赖，并将其经济完全转向了复杂产品。他们成功地利用了机遇之窗通过促进内生技能和获取国际知识资源的明智的产业政策，数字和电子领域。相比之下，