ABSTRACT
This study analyzes the trends and determines the comparative advantage and competitiveness of India's fish and fishery products trade in the world market and of India's exports to 10 major destinations over the period of 2000-2021. We use the revealed symmetric comparative advantage (RSCA) index to quantify India's comparative advantage in exporting fish and fishery products and the Vollrath index to measure the revealed competitiveness of the country's fish and fishery products trade. We collected relevant data at Harmonized System (HS) four-digit level from the UN Commodity Trade (UN Comtrade) database. Our analysis shows that India has a revealed comparative advantage (RCA) in exporting fish and fishery products to the world market. Specifically, India has a comparative advantage in exporting frozen fish, crustaceans, and mollusks;but it has a comparative disadvantage in exporting live fish, fresh and chilled fish, fish fillets and other fish meat, and dried/salted/in-brine and smoked fish to the world market. In terms of individual destinations, India has RCA in exporting live fish to Hong Kong;fresh and chilled fish to UAE (in recent years);frozen fish to China, Hong Kong, Thailand (recent years), and Vietnam (recent years);fish fillets and other fish meat to Japan (recent years);dried fish to Hong Kong;crustaceans to Japan, the US, and Canada (recent years);mollusks to the EU, Thailand (recent years), and Vietnam (recent years);and other aquatic invertebrates to Vietnam. India has a comparative disadvantage (RCD) in exporting fresh and chilled fish to the EU, Japan, the US, and Vietnam, and fish fillet and other fish meat to the US, Canada, and Vietnam. The COVID-19 pandemic has negatively affected India's export, comparative advantage, and trade competitiveness of fish and fishery products. India's RCA and competitiveness in exporting fish and fishery products decreased in 2018-2020, but the RCA and competitiveness increased by 2021.
ABSTRACT
The vegetable sector plays an important role in ensuring food security. Vegetable trade flows in Romania have become a major concern due to constant trade balance deficits despite the country’s agricultural potential. Taking into account the paradox between what could be considered an abundance of factor endowments and poor trade balance results, the objective of this research was to study the linkage between vegetable trade flows and chain competitiveness. Spatial panel econometric methods were used to study the impact of the international vegetable market on the demand in Romania, while the Balassa index and Porter’s diamond modelling techniques were used to study the competitiveness of the vegetable chain at both county and national levels. By applying the spatial regression method to the international trade and national production panel data, it was found that an increase in the quantity of vegetables imported into Romania would cause an even greater decrease in national vegetable production. The results show that Romanian vegetable production is highly and negatively influenced by the growing appetite for imports—therefore leading to a national dependence on the global vegetable chain. Porter’s diamond model results confirm that: (a) growing vegetables is profitable in Romania and the average profit margin is higher in this economic sector than in many others;(b) there is a lack of competitiveness caused by the post-communist excessively fragmented agrarian land structure and poor performance of the irrigation, warehousing, and transportation sectors;(c) the national production of vegetables is generally self-sufficient with the exception of three counties that resort to importing and account for more than 70% of Romania’s total vegetable imports;(d) factor endowments cannot be fully harnessed, and this contributes to the deepening of the trade balance deficits. Improvement is possible by fostering competitiveness through increasing the performance of supporting industries and the logistics infrastructure, as well as removing market access barriers for the many small farmers.