PUBLISHED May 28, 2026
The Export Decline: Worse Than the World Average
According to “Les exportations belges ont reculé de 4% en 2024 par rapport à 2023, mais la dépendance a augmenté”, reported by L-Post on 20 April 2026 and based on the SPF Economie’s inaugural Belgian Competitiveness Overview, Belgian exports contracted by 4 percent in 2024 relative to 2023, against a global trade decline of 3 percent. The SPF Economie’s own commentary is unambiguous: this is a more marked decline that confirms the difficulties experienced by a strongly open economy in an already deteriorating international context.
The consequence is visible in Belgium’s global positioning. With an export market share of 1.8 percent, Belgium now occupies 19th place in international rankings — a three-position drop from where the country stood previously. For a country whose economic model is built around openness and trade, a sustained loss of export market share is a fundamental challenge that cannot be attributed entirely to cyclical conditions.
Chemistry: The Exposed Engine of Belgian Exports
The Belgian Competitiveness Overview identifies the chemical and pharmaceutical sector as both the dominant component of Belgian exports — accounting for approximately 31 percent of total exports — and as particularly exposed to global economic cycles. The SPF Economie notes explicitly that dominant sectors like chemistry are particularly sensitive to the global environment and contribute significantly to this unfavorable evolution.
This concentration creates a structural amplification effect: when global trade weakens, Belgian exports weaken disproportionately because of their heavy composition of chemical and pharmaceutical products, which are closely tied to industrial production cycles worldwide. When global trade recovers, the same concentration can produce above-average Belgian export performance. The challenge is that this concentration also limits the scope for active diversification — rebalancing a national export structure toward higher-value-added or more stable sectors takes decades, not years.
The pharmaceutical component of this picture adds a specific vulnerability layer that the broader overview contextualises. Belgian biopharma — the country’s globally recognised specialty — has begun showing signs of strain: exports of pharmaceutical products fell slightly in 2024, and employment in the sector contracted for the first time in more than a decade. With 24 percent of Belgian biopharma exports going to the United States, the sector’s exposure to US pricing policy and trade measures represents a risk that Belgian competitiveness analysis must now incorporate explicitly.
The Dependency Deepens: Non-EU Import Reliance Growing
One of the structural findings of the competitiveness overview concerns Belgium’s dependence on imports from countries outside the European Union. In several key sectors — including automotive and electrical equipment manufacturing — that non-EU import dependency has increased. This trend carries two distinct risks.
The first is supply chain vulnerability. Dependence on non-EU sourcing in sectors like automotive and electronics means exposure to geopolitical disruption, tariff escalation, and logistics shocks of the kind that the Iran War has recently made vivid across Europe. When the Strait of Hormuz is disrupted or when US tariff policy shifts abruptly, Belgian manufacturers with deep non-EU supply chains face input cost volatility and potential production interruptions that their less globally exposed competitors do not.
The second risk is the comment made by the overview itself: this trend increases risks linked to geopolitical tensions. Belgium is effectively importing more vulnerability at the same time as the global environment is generating more shocks. The combination is precisely what makes the timing of the overview’s publication — April 2026, in the middle of an energy crisis triggered by the Iran War — so pointed.
Belgian exports suffer from a structural weakness in their technology content. High-technology products represented only 15 percent of Belgian exports in 2024, compared with 20 percent for Germany. While Belgium’s pharmaceutical and chemical exports are sophisticated in scientific terms, they are not typically classified as high-technology in the standard trade taxonomy — which focuses on categories like aerospace, electronics, and precision instruments.
This relatively low high-tech export share matters because high-technology products tend to command higher margins, face lower competition from low-cost producers, and are less exposed to price cycles in commodity-driven sectors. An economy with a high share of high-tech exports maintains its competitive position more easily as global wage and cost dynamics evolve. Belgium’s historical dependence on chemistry, pharmaceuticals in the broader sense, and traditional industrial goods leaves it more vulnerable to cost competition and more exposed to the downward price pressure that eventually affects products in mature technological categories.
Belgian exports suffer from a structural weakness in their technology content. High-technology products represented only 15 percent of Belgian exports in 2024, compared with 20 percent for Germany. While Belgium’s pharmaceutical and chemical exports are sophisticated in scientific terms, they are not typically classified as high-technology in the standard trade taxonomy — which focuses on categories like aerospace, electronics, and precision instruments.
This relatively low high-tech export share matters because high-technology products tend to command higher margins, face lower competition from low-cost producers, and are less exposed to price cycles in commodity-driven sectors. An economy with a high share of high-tech exports maintains its competitive position more easily as global wage and cost dynamics evolve. Belgium’s historical dependence on chemistry, pharmaceuticals in the broader sense, and traditional industrial goods leaves it more vulnerable to cost competition and more exposed to the downward price pressure that eventually affects products in mature technological categories.
Against this backdrop of export decline, market share loss, and structural vulnerability, the Belgian Competitiveness Overview identifies one genuinely strong performance indicator: research and development intensity. Belgium’s R&D expenditure as a share of GDP rose from 3.1 percent in 2015 to 3.4 percent in 2024. By contrast, the average for Belgium’s neighbours declined over the same period to 2.2 percent of GDP.
This is a meaningful gap. An R&D intensity of 3.4 percent of GDP places Belgium among the most research-intensive economies in Europe, ahead of France, the Netherlands, and significantly ahead of the EU average. This investment in innovation creates the basis for future competitive advantage — in new products, new processes, and new technologies that can sustain Belgian productivity growth even as cost pressures intensify.
The challenge is that R&D investment today typically takes 10 to 15 years to fully manifest in commercial export performance. The innovation pipeline that Belgium is building now will support the export products of the late 2030s. In the meantime, the structural weaknesses documented in the 2024 export data — concentration in exposed sectors, low high-tech share, growing non-EU dependency — remain operative constraints on Belgian competitiveness in the near term.
The regional dimension of Belgian export performance adds another layer of complexity to the national picture. Brussels saw its goods exports collapse by approximately 25 percent in 2024 to €8.9 billion — a dramatic decline driven largely by the closure of the Audi Brussels plant, which eliminated a major manufacturing export base from the capital region. Exports from Brussels to Germany fell by 41 percent and to France by 13.7 percent.
By contrast, Flanders increased its share of Belgian exports while reducing its trade deficit, and Wallonia was the only Belgian region to record a trade surplus in 2024. This regional divergence reflects the uneven distribution of Belgium’s industrial assets: Flanders concentrates the country’s port activity, chemical clusters, and international logistics networks; Wallonia houses significant aerospace, defence, and specialty industrial capacity; while Brussels is transitioning away from manufacturing toward services but losing export capacity in the process.
The Belgian Competitiveness Overview is not merely a diagnostic document — it is the foundation for a policy conversation. The SPF Economie’s choice to produce this as a regular publication signals a recognition that Belgium needs a structured, evidence-based framework for tracking its competitive position and identifying where policy intervention can strengthen it.
The timing is significant. Belgium’s export performance in 2024 was disappointing. Its 2025 national accounts show exports contracting again. Its business confidence is weakening. And it faces an external environment in 2026 — shaped by the Middle East conflict, US tariff uncertainty, and slow European growth — that is generating additional headwinds for an already challenged export sector. A country that has built its prosperity on openness and trade cannot afford to watch its export market share erode year after year without a coherent response.
The overview’s findings — export decline, structural concentration, growing non-EU dependency, and insufficient high-technology content — define the agenda. Belgium’s R&D strength suggests the capacity to address it. What remains to be seen is whether the political and institutional conditions exist to translate that innovative capacity into the export performance that Belgium’s open economy model requires.
Against this backdrop of export decline, market share loss, and structural vulnerability, the Belgian Competitiveness Overview identifies one genuinely strong performance indicator: research and development intensity. Belgium’s R&D expenditure as a share of GDP rose from 3.1 percent in 2015 to 3.4 percent in 2024. By contrast, the average for Belgium’s neighbours declined over the same period to 2.2 percent of GDP.
This is a meaningful gap. An R&D intensity of 3.4 percent of GDP places Belgium among the most research-intensive economies in Europe, ahead of France, the Netherlands, and significantly ahead of the EU average. This investment in innovation creates the basis for future competitive advantage — in new products, new processes, and new technologies that can sustain Belgian productivity growth even as cost pressures intensify.
The challenge is that R&D investment today typically takes 10 to 15 years to fully manifest in commercial export performance. The innovation pipeline that Belgium is building now will support the export products of the late 2030s. In the meantime, the structural weaknesses documented in the 2024 export data — concentration in exposed sectors, low high-tech share, growing non-EU dependency — remain operative constraints on Belgian competitiveness in the near term.
The regional dimension of Belgian export performance adds another layer of complexity to the national picture. Brussels saw its goods exports collapse by approximately 25 percent in 2024 to €8.9 billion — a dramatic decline driven largely by the closure of the Audi Brussels plant, which eliminated a major manufacturing export base from the capital region. Exports from Brussels to Germany fell by 41 percent and to France by 13.7 percent.
By contrast, Flanders increased its share of Belgian exports while reducing its trade deficit, and Wallonia was the only Belgian region to record a trade surplus in 2024. This regional divergence reflects the uneven distribution of Belgium’s industrial assets: Flanders concentrates the country’s port activity, chemical clusters, and international logistics networks; Wallonia houses significant aerospace, defence, and specialty industrial capacity; while Brussels is transitioning away from manufacturing toward services but losing export capacity in the process.
The Belgian Competitiveness Overview is not merely a diagnostic document — it is the foundation for a policy conversation. The SPF Economie’s choice to produce this as a regular publication signals a recognition that Belgium needs a structured, evidence-based framework for tracking its competitive position and identifying where policy intervention can strengthen it.
The timing is significant. Belgium’s export performance in 2024 was disappointing. Its 2025 national accounts show exports contracting again. Its business confidence is weakening. And it faces an external environment in 2026 — shaped by the Middle East conflict, US tariff uncertainty, and slow European growth — that is generating additional headwinds for an already challenged export sector. A country that has built its prosperity on openness and trade cannot afford to watch its export market share erode year after year without a coherent response.
The overview’s findings — export decline, structural concentration, growing non-EU dependency, and insufficient high-technology content — define the agenda. Belgium’s R&D strength suggests the capacity to address it. What remains to be seen is whether the political and institutional conditions exist to translate that innovative capacity into the export performance that Belgium’s open economy model requires.
