The country can no longer afford this: the price of nickel, the main export, has fallen.
Coups can be a lucrative business, and although its main export is cashew nuts, Guinea-Bissau offers tempting opportunities.
And the market for bauxite and alumina, its main export goods, has been rockier than for other commodities.
Aside from the Republic of Ireland, the main export markets are the US, Switzerland, France, Germany and the Netherlands.
This year the price of Russia's main export commodity, oil, has fallen sharply.
Britain, the euro-area's other main export market, is on the brink of recession.
Now the economy is starting to slow, hit by the woes of the United States and Venezuela, Colombia's main export markets.
If the price of oil, Ecuador's main export, remains low, Mr Correa will have much less money to spend on social programmes.
Recessions in Brazil and Argentina - its main export markets and sources of tourists - propelled the country into economic crisis in 2002.
The depreciation in sterling over the past year should support net exports, but the prospects for demand growth in the UK's main export markets have worsened.
But the main export route for Azeri oil has yet to be decided and there'll be stiff competition for this and other pipeline routes out of the region.
There have been persistent concerns about whether Japan's fragile economic recovery will be able to withstand a sharp slowdown in growth in the US, its main export market.
Not surprisingly, the province's main export has long been people.
It can easily finance the resulting fiscal deficit forecast at 3% of GDP this year because it built up a war chest of public savings when prices for copper, its main export, were high.
As long as its main export markets, such as China and the United States, keep growing, its firms should be able to cope with a modest loss of competitiveness in the form of a higher yen.
Although table grapes are by far the main fruit export, Chile began exporting wines in a significant way in the 1980s and achieving important world market shares in the 1990s.
One of the main reasons was a sharp decline in new export orders, with manufacturers blaming slacker demand in Europe and China.
Its main markets are the United States and Japan, and its principal export is electronics.
Recently, for example, I was in Nicaragua visiting a new client, a 700-member farmer cooperative that produces coffee for export and corn for domestic consumption The cooperative sells 300 tons of corn annually to its main buyer, the World Food Programme which is used to produce 6.7 million school lunches a year or one meal per day for 44, 000 children for an entire school year.
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