Over the course of 35 years of independence, Moldova has lost a significant portion of the industrial base with which it began its independent economic history. No fully-fledged new industrial base of comparable scale has emerged to replace it. Instead, the country is now approaching another milestone: services account for nearly half of all Moldovan exports.
In 2025, Moldova exported approximately $3.22 billion in services—46% of total exports of goods and services. Exports of goods totaled $3.78 billion. The gap between exports of goods and services amounted to only about $560 million. Official data from the NBS confirms goods exports of $3.783 billion, while according to the Investment Agency, services exports in 2025 totaled about $3.2 billion.
This appears to be a shift toward a post-industrial economy. But there is a fundamental difference: developed countries achieved dominance in services after industrialization. Moldova—after deindustrialization.
By the end of the 1990s, the country's industrial output stood at only 32% of its 1989 level, GDP at 34%, and investment in fixed assets at 11%. This was not a smooth transition from factories to computers, but rather the collapse of a significant portion of the former production system. In the decades that followed, new enterprises emerged, primarily in the food industry, the production of electrical equipment, and auto parts, but the country was unable to restore its industrial base to its former scale. Now, the economy seems to be trying to skip over part of this phase.
Exports That Don't Need Railcars
The new export-oriented economy operates by different rules. A programmer doesn't need a seaport, a digital product doesn't need a truck, and a consulting firm doesn't need a railroad. For a small landlocked country, this allows it to circumvent some of the constraints that traditionally hold back the export of goods.
In 2025, the trade surplus in services reached approximately $1.04 billion. Moldova exports IT, transportation, tourism, professional, educational, and medical services abroad. The IT sector alone generated more than €1.05 billion in sales, with foreign clients accounting for about 90% of that total. In effect, this is already the country's second-largest export sector.
The contrast is particularly striking when compared to trade in goods, whose deficit reached $7.14 billion in 2025, according to the NBS. But the problem is not just the size of the deficit. A significant portion of Moldova's goods exports remains closer to the beginning of the production chain than to its end.
We're selling just the seeds, not the entire value chain
According to the NBS, oilseeds and fruits became the largest commodity export group in 2025, accounting for 15.5% of total goods exports. Electrical machinery and equipment accounted for 15.1%, vegetables and fruits for 11.4%, and grains and grain products for 8%. Vegetable oils accounted for only 3.1%.
In the first quarter of 2026, the share of oilseeds and fruits had already risen to 21.3% of merchandise exports. Selling sunflower seeds when the global market offers a good price is not a bad thing in itself. The question is this: what portion of the potential added value does Moldova retain domestically when it exports raw materials rather than products resulting from their further processing?
This is even more evident with grain. In July and August 2026 alone, Moldova exported 378,200 tons of wheat worth approximately 1.4 billion lei. At the same time, from the beginning of the year through August 26, the country exported 16,400 tons of flour and imported nearly the same amount—15,700 tons. However, flour exports brought in 87.1 million lei, while imports cost 120.7 million lei. The average price of imported flour was 7.69 lei per kilogram, compared to 5.30 lei for exported flour.
A direct comparison here would be inaccurate: Moldova primarily exports flour in large batches for industrial use, whereas imports consist mainly of more expensive, pre-packaged products. But it is precisely between these stages that added value arises—processing, packaging, product variety, branding, distribution, and shelf space.
In the traditional economy, Moldova still too often sells the beginning of the production chain. In the new service-based economy, it has already learned to sell the end product.
And the most valuable resource is leaving on its own
But the new model has a weak spot. In a service-based economy, people become the main resource—and it is precisely this resource that Moldova has been losing for decades.
Between the 2014 and 2024 censuses, the country's population declined by 13.6%, and the number of young people aged 15–35 fell by 38.5%. The share of the working-age population decreased from 64.7% to 55.7%. These figures are provided by the National Bureau of Statistics.
Not all of this is due to emigration: the population is aging, the birth rate is declining, and natural population decline continues. However, migration remains one of the main factors contributing to the decline. In 2023, the net migration loss totaled 32,600 people, and people aged 20–39 accounted for about 39% of emigrants.
The economic damage caused by this outflow cannot be measured solely by the number of people who have left. The country loses the investments it has already made in a person's education and training, as well as their future tax contributions, consumption, professional experience, and entrepreneurial activity. The receiving economy gains a worker, a significant portion of the costs of whose development were borne by Moldova.
Meanwhile, there are no reliable statistics to support the claim that, in recent years, it is primarily the more affluent citizens who are leaving. Instead, the age distribution highlights a problem of greater economic significance: the outflow affects the most economically active generations.
Against the backdrop of a labor shortage, Moldova itself is beginning to attract workers from abroad. At the end of 2025, more than 21,500 foreigners and stateless persons from over 130 countries were registered in the country, and about 16,000 of them held temporary residence permits. At the same time, the authorities explicitly cite staff shortages in certain sectors as one of the reasons for streamlining the mechanisms for attracting foreign workers.
The economic logic is clear. Some Moldovan workers leave for places where their labor is better paid, and the domestic labor shortage increases the need for workers from abroad.
Therefore, what matters for the economy is no longer just the number of people leaving and arriving, but also what kind of human capital the country is losing and what kind it is able to retain or attract.
Post-industrial—or simply less industrial?
How should we describe the current transformation of the Moldovan economy? Deindustrialization and post-industrialization may look similar statistically: the share of industry is decreasing, while that of services is growing. But in the first case, the country loses its manufacturing capacity; in the second, it transitions to activities with higher productivity and added value.
Moldova is currently experiencing a combination of both processes. It exports large volumes of wheat and oilseeds, leaving part of the potential value added to other economies. Thus, it is already selling billions of dollars' worth of services where knowledge is the primary resource. And at the same time, it is losing a significant portion of the people who are needed to build this new economy.
Development does not require choosing between a factory and an IT company. Moldova needs both longer production chains and more sophisticated service exports.
During the first decades of independence, the country lost a significant portion of its former industrial capital. Now, human capital is becoming the main form of capital.
And while the problem used to be that Moldova too often exported raw materials instead of finished products, a more costly version of the same problem is now emerging: exporting people instead of the products of their labor.
The growth of services to 46% of exports shows that the opportunity to build a different economic model has already emerged. But everything will depend on the country's ability to retain not only more added value from wheat and sunflower seeds, but also the people capable of creating that value. // 25.09.2026 – InfoMarket.