Competitiveness of international merchandise trade: The case of Poland

Abstract

The aim of the article is to present the possibilities that qualitative classifications of industries and goods introduce to the analysis of structural changes in the economy, as well as to assess changes in the international competitiveness of Polish merchandise trade in the long term. The article presents a review of the literature and the results of authors’ own research on the structure of Polish merchandise trade. The study uses Lall’s classification of goods which is relatively innovative and rarely used in the existing literature. By using this classification and the analysis of revealed comparative advantages (RCA) we also managed to assess the competitiveness of Polish exports. The research shows that since Poland’s accession to the European Union, the international competitiveness of Polish trade in terms of its technological level has changed only slightly. After the growth in the first years of Poland’s EU membership, the share of high technology products in the export structure stagnated in the 2010s and was still lower than that of medium or low technology products. Throughout the researched period, the RCA for high-tech products remained on the “foreign” side.