Examine the complexity of Iran’s Petrochemical Industry and its future opportunities

This research aims to investigate technological capabilities competitiveness of Iran’s petrochemical industry products in 2016 . The main questions of the study are 1) in which petrochemical industry products does Iran enjoys a revealed comparative advantage? 2) what are the opportunities for Iran to diversify petrochemical export basket? in order to answer these questions we have used an approach called economic complexity. Based on harmonized system at the 6-digit level (HS6) in 2016, our results indicate that, Iran had revealed comparative advantage in export of 35 petrochemical industry products. In order to evaluate opportunities, the proximity border of technological capabilities was mapped using 3 criterias of distance, product complexity and opportunity gain. The results identified 44 new products. These are products that lead the country to more technological capabilities and a higher level of complexity, and at the same time they are not far from the current technological capabilities of the country. Finally, to prioritize selected products, we examined the international markets of these products according to three criterias: Number of main competitors exporting, World trade volume and Number of countries importing the product , at the end 7 products were selected as priority products.