TY - JOUR
TI - EU membership and exports competitiveness – benchmarking exports structures of Poland and Slovakia versus Bulgaria and Romania, and their convergence to the German pattern in the years 2000–2014
AU - Czarny, Elżbieta
AU - Żmuda, Małgorzata
TI - EU membership and exports competitiveness – benchmarking exports structures of Poland and Slovakia versus Bulgaria and Romania, and their convergence to the German pattern in the years 2000–2014
AB - 
	The competitiveness of a nation is associated with a set of characteristics that enable structural adjustments to global technological trends and improvement of living standards. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the competitiveness of Poland and Slovakia (in the EU since 2004) versus Bulgaria and Romania (in the EU since 2007) through the prism of their exports structure convergence to Germany, the strongest EU economy, in the years 2000–2014. The empirical analysis is based on Balassa’s [1965] concept of Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) and conducted in a dynamic perspective. We use the UN trade statistics in the International Trade Classification (SITC), Rev. 3, with the exported goods grouped along their factor-intensities, following the methodology developed by Wysokińska [1997]. Within the analysed period, the catching-up economies have, to some extent, evolved towards knowledge-based economies, but not all of them with the same intensity and for the same commodity groups. Their competitive position in the exports of low-tech goods (i.e., resource- and labour-intensive) has not changed. The hypothesis that countries most lagging behind Germany at the beginning of the analysed period have undergone the largest adjustment (exports specialization convergence) appears true only in the case of Romania.
VL - 2018
IS - Volume 37
PY - 2018
SN - 2300-6102
C1 - 2353-9496
SP - 479
EP - 492
DO - 10.4467/23539496IB.18.035.9408
UR - https://ejournals.eu/en/journal/ibage/article/eu-membership-and-exports-competitiveness-benchmarking-exports-structures-of-poland-and-slovakia-versus-bulgaria-and-romania-and-their-convergence-to-the-german-pattern-in-the-years-2000-2014
KW - exports competitiveness
KW - exports specialisation convergence
KW - catching-up economy