In all the countries which made a huge civilisation leap in the latter half of the 20th century, such as Japan, the Asian tigers or more recently, Ireland, the accelerated economic growth was combined with export of goods not previously manufactured in those countries. The learning-by-doing model can be helpful in establishing the relation between fast GDP growth and increased manufacturing of high technology goods. The paper presents a simple version of this model.

Textbooks in macroeconomics which introduce the model typically choose aggregated capital stock in the economy as the explanatory variable for "knowledge". The author assumed capital stock per unit of labour to be the explanatory variable for "knowledge".