Abstract: Is exporting potato chips really the same than exporting microchips for a country economic growth?Is moving toward dynamic sectors a key for economic growth? This paper exploits a dataset for 188 countries and almost 7000 sectors over the 1962-2004 period. Our purpose is to determine if and how sectoral structure of trade influences economic growth, both from a static and a dynamic perpective. Different theoretical lines of research give suggestions in this direction: both past keynesian contributions and the endogenous growth theory literature suggest that economic structure can play an effective role in influencing economic growth. Our empirical analysis shows that there is some evidence of this kind. We test the robustness of our results, checking the sensitivity of our main results to several alternatives.