F10 - Trade: GeneralReturn

In the lens of European integration, national competitiveness no longer depends just on national inheritance, but also on the new member states' capacity of exploiting existing advantages of EU membership. In this paper, we closely follow the effects of European Union (EU) admission on national competitiveness for eleven Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries that joined the EU after 2004. The analysis includes new specific variables that we consider potential boosters of competitiveness in this particular sample of countries, besides the proxies generally used in the literature. The results indicate that, for most of the CEE countries, EU accession bought both domestic and international advantages, with a more visible positive change in the international position. Although we were able to classify the analysed economies into three distinct groups, there are still notable differences across the CEE countries that require differentiated strategies for enhancing competitiveness.

In most cases, the rules of the game in international trade are shaped by political economy, but this interplay is more noticeable in politically sensitive sectors such as agriculture. The balance between domestic political interests and the considerations concerning international relations changes over time in response to the joint action of a variety of factors, and this is mirrored in the multilateral trade regime governing this sector. Combining a broad set of empirical evidence available at the international level, this paper aims to capture the pattern of tariff and non-tariff protectionism in the global agricultural trade. The investigation leads to some stylized facts emerging from the selected data and provides interesting conclusions on the behaviour of governments in the equation of balancing domestic interests with the need for international collaboration. The pattern of protectionism in international trade in agricultural products is tariff--based, with a tendency towards softening of this protection in both developed and developing economies. Tariff protection is accompanied by a much lower level of non-tariff protection, where the most frequently used instrument is sanitary and phytosanitary standards, for reasons dictated partly by the specific nature of the sector.

The main topic of this article is the bilateral trade in value added between the USA and China. The goal is to look at this bilateral trade in the context of "the new wave of globalization". To fulfill this broadly specified goal the article tries to answer following questions: How much are the USA and China involved in global value chains (GVC)? What is the development of the classical bilateral trade using the balance of payments methodology? Where does the value added in exports come from (geographical structure)? Are there any differences between different industry sectors? One of the main findings is that domestic value added in trade between these two countries is relatively high (US almost 90%, China more than 80%). There was also a trend of stagnation in the United States and a volatility across most of the indicators in the case of China.

The paper deals with effects of trade liberalization of EU goods exports to the USA. Despite the current protectionist tendencies of US President Donald Trump, the USA is strongly motivated to promote a deeper trade liberalization in the longer horizon, further strengthening bilateral trade flows, increasing economic efficiency, and thus contributing to the growth of both economies. The primary objective is to evaluate a hypothesis which states that reducing political trade barriers could notably increase the flows. We use gravity models and our own constructed non-tariff trade barrier time series based on tens of thousands of values for EU-28 countries in relation to the USA between 1995–2014. The data are obtained from an analysis of US legislature, in contrast to previous studies which used subjective survey data. The secondary goal is to assess whether a substantial reduction of non-tariff barriers is realistic or not, an issue which other researchers have overlooked. The level of bilateral non-tariff barriers imposed by the USA against EU exporters is rather low in the international comparison, a substantial reduction is not a reasonable assumption. We conclude that dealing with non-tariff trade barriers is crucial as it can substantially increase the bilateral trade flows. Even a less optimistic scenario, with a smaller decrease in trade barriers, suggests that the EU goods exports to the USA could be increased by more than 20%.

The growing number of players in world trade increases competition among countries. It has also a significant implication for the EU member states that are differently dependant on international trade. The object of the paper was to evaluate the export competitiveness and productivity of the EU member states in 2000-2015 using the Factor Analysis and the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method. The results of trade analyses confirmed that the level of the export competitiveness was different in the individual EU member states and that it had also been changed during the monitored period. However, the original hypothesis about the level of export productivity was not confirmed. The results of the DEA analysis pointed more to economic convergence in the trade area between the new and old EU member states than to export productivity. The development of the EU trade was influenced by globalisation processes accompanied by trade liberalisation, but also the EU integration process.

The authorship of the principle of comparative advantage is generally credited to David Ricardo. Recent papers published in scientific journals have cast doubt on this axiom and have debated roles of Robert Torrens, James Mill and John Stuart Mill in its history. We show many of the arguments used in this debate are unscientific and unverifiable. After conducting an analysis of the history of development of the principle we define the difference between minimum satisfactory and complex formulation of the principle. We come to the conclusion that the first satisfactory explanation of comparative advantage was offered by Robert Torrens.

Empirical research on the differences between unit values in the EU's trade with the Czech Republic and the intra-EU average has shown a significant changes. The comparative level of manufacturing products imported from the Czech republic has increased, the comparative level of products exported to the Czech republic has decreased. The price-gaps, inherited from the communist regime have been substantially reduced. Most remarkable changes of the comparative prices took place in trade with products of metalworking industries. The favourable development of price relations in the Czech foreign trade has been an important element underlying balance of payments performance, it has contributed to the nominal and real improvements of Czech krown and shoud play an importent role in the process of convergence. The analysis is based on Eurostat Comext Database.