Economic analysis of Hungary’s food export competitiveness

Juhász, Anikó – Wagner, Hartmut

Keywords: export competitiveness, food products, foreign trade, CM S analysis, unit value

The Hungarian agri-food sector export has grown dynamically over the last decade. We used constant market share (CMS) analysis to decompose the changes in export growth into components. Almost without exception, the increasing market size provided the majority of export growth. The commodity (composition) and competitiveness effect components had varied results and were not so positive. They showed that the Hungarian export structure was less adaptive to demand changes in the target export markets.
There were positive examples of export growth however, such as Italy and Slovakia, where the competitiveness effect explained more than half of the Hungarian exports. The negative examples are numerous; the most important are the Polish and Italian trade relation-ships where competitiveness effectiveness almost halved the measured export growth poten-tial.
By analysing the price and quality competitiveness with relative unit value (RUV) cal-culations we could show that in the case of the cereal and oilseed commodities the relatively lower-priced products could improve their market position. In the case of the German market Hungarian rapeseed and maize gained market share with relatively low prices, and on the Ital-ian market this was true for wheat and maize. The analysed meat products on the other hand could only secure a stable market position with their average prices on the German and Italian markets.

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