Analysis of Development of Czech Foreign Trade in Foods and Beverages
No 4/2014, December
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to analyse the development of Czech foreign trade in food products and beverages (the CPA groups 10 and 11 within the Classification System) and to evaluate the position of individual CPA groups and their products, even within the EU, using two indices of comparative advantage (RCA) and trade balances. The purpose is to contribute to a deeper understanding of the given issue as the analytical work dealing with whole Czech agrarian foreign trade is less focused on foods and drinks. However, they should be a core area of business, especially with regard to competitiveness of the agricultural sector. The sources of data on foreign trade are public databases of Czech Statistical Office (External Trade Database) and Eurostat (International Trade database ComExt). Regarding the time series, period of the years 2005-2013 is analysed. Significant changes in the sales and purchases of foodstuff and beverages were occurred in the context of accession to the EU but these changes are not in focus yet. The paper is engaged in the period when the Czech Republic has already been a member of the EU, and fully entrenched. The point is which results in foreign trade with.Results showed that value of Czech imports of food products and beverages in the years 2005-2013 increased in the larger extent than exports, and negative trade balance deepened by 51 % to 29.3 Bn CZK. The degree of coverage of imports by exports, however, improved from 73.0 % to 77.3 % due to lower dynamics of growth of imports than exports.Besides of the own assessment of the Czech food and beverage foreign trade, our work has consisted in specific transfer of the Combined Nomenclature to the nomenclature CPA. The methodological contribution is then our own list of customs codes, respectively their aggregations, belonging to the individual CPA disciplines. This should be useful for next analysis.
Keywords
Food, beverages, exports, imports, trade balance, RCA index, Classification of Products by Activity (CPA), Combined Nomenclature of the EU, agrarian trade.