World Bank High-Technology Exports Indicator

One comparable number per economy per year, already computed. Series TX.VAL.TECH.MF.ZS expresses high-technology exports as a percentage of manufactured exports for 200+ World Bank member economies, published annually from 2007 through 2024. The World Bank defines the basket by R&D intensity and names its contents outright - aerospace, computers, pharmaceuticals, scientific instruments and electrical machinery - which makes the series a widely used proxy for national electronics and instruments export competitiveness. A companion series, TX.VAL.TECH.CD, restates the concept in current US dollars.

Two properties do most of the work. First, the ratio form: dividing by manufactured exports cancels out economic size, so a landlocked micro-economy and a continental exporter occupy one comparable scale. Second, the provenance: the figures derive from the UN Comtrade database published by the UN Statistics Division together with the World Bank's WITS system - reported bilateral trade, aggregated once upstream so nobody has to rebuild it.

Read straight off the published table, China ran 27.77% in 2022, 30.22% in 2021 and 31.28% in 2020 - a three-year slide worth arguing about, available as data rather than anecdote. Get a sample of this dataset cut to your economies and years, and real rows arrive before any feed commitment.

Real observations captured during cataloging - China, the economy whose high-technology export share is the most-quoted number in this series:

# TX.VAL.TECH.MF.ZS - high-technology exports, % of manufactured exports
indicator : TX.VAL.TECH.MF.ZS
            High-technology exports (% of manufactured exports)
country   : China          iso2: CN    iso3: CHN
date      : 2022           value: 27.77

# same economy, prior years - the series reads as a trend line, not a snapshot
date      : 2021           value: 30.22
date      : 2020           value: 31.28

# companion series restates the concept in current US dollars
companion : TX.VAL.TECH.CD high-technology exports (current US$)

envelope   : page 1 of N   total <economies x years>   source id 2 (World Development Indicators)
refreshed  : 2026-07-13

Three details carry the weight. The economy is identified three ways - two-letter code, ISO three-letter code, plain name - so joins to external country masters need no lookup table. The value arrives as a full-precision float, not a rounded display figure, which matters when twenty economies cluster within a few percentage points. And the envelope reports its own refresh date, so a consumer always knows which vintage it is holding.

Thirteen documented fields ride on every delivered row. Six identify the observation - layered economy codes, series identity, the year - and one carries the value itself; the rest are metadata that make the row self-documenting, from display precision to the refresh date that tells you which vintage you are holding. Definitions below were verified against live responses during cataloging in August 2026, including a genuine multi-year pull for China.

Additional fields on request: topic classifications for the series, and the six sibling export-share series (agricultural, food, fuel, ICT goods, manufactures, metal and mining) delivered in the identical thirteen-column shape when a benchmark needs comparators. Name the economies and years when you request a sample and the extract comes back carrying exactly those rows.

Geography - 200+ World Bank member economies and aggregates, one national figure per economy per year. Because the unit is a ratio rather than an absolute, a micro-state and an industrial giant sit on the same comparable scale without any rescaling step.

Temporal - 2007 through 2024 on the published year selector: eighteen annual observations per economy where reporting is complete, long enough to hold the pre-2008 export boom, the trade collapse, and the post-2019 supply-chain reshuffle inside one continuous line. Earlier vintages of the series remain retrievable, so a longer study does not start at the selector's floor.

Granularity - country x year and nothing finer. No product detail, no subnational split, no monthly cadence: this dataset deliberately trades depth for comparability, which is why teams pair it with HS-level trade flows when they need to open the basket.

Set against the wider Datadory catalog - average quality score 7.81 across all 1,744 datasets - this slice scores 8/10, carried by verified field definitions and a fixed, documented unit of measure.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

You choose the channel and the cadence; the thirteen-field schema travels unchanged through all three. Annual series reward scheduling over polling: a yearly capture keyed to the refresh date accumulates into a panel without gaps, while most-recent-value views serve dashboards that only need the latest print per economy. Rows arrive flattened - one observation per economy and year - ready to join against shipment, production or patent tables without a parsing stage, and cadence changes are a settings conversation, not a re-integration project.

• Cross-country competitiveness benchmarking - one definition applied identically across 200+ economies turns a reconciliation project into a filter: rank, band and trend economies on tech-export intensity without touching a customs file.
• Structural tech-upgrading tracking - the ratio moves slowly and directionally, so multi-year slopes separate genuine upgrading in emerging manufacturing bases from single-year noise; the 2007-2024 window spans both the boom and the reshuffle.
• Market-entry screening - score candidate territories on technology-export intensity before committing field research; the dollar-value companion series keeps absolute scale in view alongside the share.
• Macro features for models - a clean, fully-typed country-year panel with stable identifiers drops into factor models and scoring pipelines as a slow-moving structural regressor.
• Citable context for reports and journalism - published development-indicator figures with methodology attached, quotable directly rather than re-derived from trade files.
• Export-mix shift monitoring - watch which economies' high-tech share moves against their manufactured-export growth, the earliest readable signal of where electronics assembly capacity is migrating.

Market researchers and consultants hold this dataset at relevance 3 in their electronic-equipment pack - cross-country benchmarking on a maintained, citable definition is precisely their deliverable. Developers and data-product builders also score relevance 3: a fixed schema and typed values mean an integration measured in minutes, not sprints. Journalists, academics and students round out the top tier, citing published development-indicator values in trade and development writing. Data scientists and ML engineers use it as country-year feature engineering material. Investors and quants track structural tech-upgrading across emerging markets as macro context beneath sector positions. Competitive-intel and product teams read exporter-mix shifts for relocation evidence, and sales and growth teams screen territories by tech-export intensity before planning expansion.

Three things worth knowing upfront. First, the grain is fixed at country x year - there is no product detail inside the number, so questions about which technologies drive an economy's share need an HS-level trade dataset opened alongside it; the two join cleanly on economy and year. Second, the basket is defined by R&D intensity and named broadly - aerospace, computers, pharmaceuticals, scientific instruments, electrical machinery - so treat the figure as an electronics-plus-instruments competitiveness proxy rather than a semiconductor-only read. Third, not every economy reports every year: gaps stay explicit as nulls rather than collapsing to zero, and a panel should decide up front whether it balances, fills or leaves those holes legible.

Within the same industry slice, World Bank Indicators API is the breadth play: the full 16,000+-series catalogue behind this one indicator, reached with the same record shape - pick it when high-tech export share needs to sit beside manufacturing value added, R&D expenditure and ICT goods trade in one pipeline. UN Comtrade Plus TradeFlow for HS 85/90 is the depth play, opening the bilateral flows this series aggregates away, at monthly cadence and with weight and quantity attached. This dataset occupies the middle deliberately: no query design, no classification stitching - one finished benchmark, comparable across 200+ economies, the fastest defensible answer to 'how tech-intensive is this economy's export engine'. Most teams run it as the headline layer and call on the other two when a claim needs receipts.

Notes that pair well with this page:

• Electronic equipment & instruments data hub - the pooled industry view, from patent streams to component catalogs.
• World Bank High-Technology Exports Indicator vs World Bank Indicators API - one polished series against the 16,000-series catalogue it lives in.
• Persona pages - what market researchers, developers and journalists each do with this slice, industry by industry.