Over the last two decades the share of CEE countries' exports of goods in world exports more than doubled, despite considerable appreciation of their real effective exchange rates. Inspired by this observation, we set out to establish which factors had impact on their export performance. For that purpose, we run a series of panel regressions in which export market shares are explained by various measures of price/cost competitiveness, technological advancement and institutional environment. We make two important contributions to the subject literature. We show that technological factors, specifically innovative outputs (patent applications), had the most significant positive impact on export performance and that was in addition to their impact through the economic potential. Moreover, we verify the impact of the quality of the institutional environment on exports. Specifically, we show that improvements in the overall regulatory quality were conducive to increasing export market shares. The results regarding price/cost competitiveness are less robust and depend on the measure used. Hence, we conclude that further gains in non-price competitiveness should be considered for the region to compete successfully in international markets in the long run.
This article analyses exports of services from Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia between 2010 and 2018, focusing on specialisation and sophistication, also known as complexity. The symmetric revealed comparative advantage index was used to determine fields of specialisation, and PRODY and EXPY indices were used to measure complexity. The results suggest that the Visegrad countries predominantly specialised in the export of relatively unsophisticated services compared to other European Union countries. Still, exports of services from the Visegrad countries were more complex than their real GDP per capita would suggest, and this sophistication is growing. This is due to the convergence of sophistication levels between service categories rather than advances in the structure of services exported by the Visegrad countries. Hence, integration with more developed European Union countries sustained existing fields of specialisation.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.