DOI: https://doi.org/10.36719/2706-6185/63/130-137
Digitalization, Institutional Quality and Export Diversification: A Synthesis of Evidence from Emerging Economies
Nurlan Meherremov 
Abstract. This paper examines whether digitalization promotes export diversification in emerging economies and whether institutional quality conditions that effect. It develops a transaction-cost framework in which digital infrastructure lowers the fixed costs of entering new export lines — buyer search, documentation and border compliance — while institutions determine the share of returns an exporter can appropriate. Three testable propositions are derived from the framework and confronted with a structured synthesis of the empirical literature, assembled through systematic searches of RePEc, Scopus-indexed journals and the working-paper series of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The evidence supports complementarity rather than substitution: digitalization broadens export baskets and raises their technological sophistication, but weak governance blunts and can reverse these returns. Firm-level evidence indicates that home-country corruption steepens the curvilinear relationship between digitalization and export propensity, amplifying both the gains of digital leaders and the losses of the over-extended. The substitution view survives only as a process-level claim about narrow verification functions such as customs processing and documentary compliance, not as an economy-wide alternative to contract enforcement. The paper specifies a replicable panel design for twenty-four emerging economies over 2000–2023 using openly available data, and derives sequencing implications for diversification policy: customs efficiency and regulatory predictability are preconditions for, rather than complements to, digital investment.
Keywords: export diversification, digitization, institutional quality, governance, emerging economies, transaction costs