Abstract: This paper first divides the formal system into three categories including political institution, economic institution and legal institution, and then empirically analyzes the influence of institutional quality on the export complexity of high-tech manufactured goods based on the panel data of 52 economic entities from 1996 to 2011. The result shows that the improvement of the institutional quality can play a significant role in promoting export complexity of high-tech manufactured goods; however, the quality of different institutions has different influence on export complexity of high-tech manufactured goods made by developing economic entities or developed economic entities. Therefore，to improve institutional quality is an important way to promote the export complexity of high-tech manufactured goods．

Key words: institutional quality; export complexity; high-tech manufactured goods