Abstract
European Union’s enlargement to eastern and central Europe’s countries imposed a challenge to southern Europe’s countries. With similar labor intensive specialization patterns, but much lower production costs and better qualified human capital than eastern and central Europe’s countries, southern Europe faced serious threats to their competitiveness. This chapter compares the export performance of these two groups of countries in the period 2000s through the analysis of two specific representative countries: Portugal and Poland. The study is based on a Constant Market Share analysis, which allows to decompose the export growth into several components; and a combination of revealed comparative indexes with a geographical orientation measure. We conclude that while Poland registered a great and impressive export performance across the analyzed period, increasing around 100 % the country’s market share to the EU15, Portugal has evolved in the opposite direction, with an average market share decrease of 7 %. Although it was not the only factor, we conclude that Poland’s competitiveness effect was essential to explain Poland’s increasing industries export share. Several reasons are proposed for the different course taken by the two countries.
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Notes
- 1.
A limitation of this analysis is that it is not possible to disentangle the influence of the price and volume competition. For instance, the export data is generally in USD value, instead of domestic currency. Hence variations in market share are influenced by variations in USD exchange rate. It means that, ceteris paribus, an appreciation of the USD will result in a decline in the market share of the country analysed.
- 2.
See Amador et al. (2009).
- 3.
OECD (2014a) points the raise of the regular work week of central government employees from 35 to 40 h with no pay rise in September 2013.
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Acknowledgement
The authors are grateful to seminar participants at the EBES Lisbon 2014 for helpful comments. The financial support for this project is provided by national funds of FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia). This article is part of the Strategic Project: PEst-OE/EGE/UIO436/2011.
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Marques, C., Paulino, I., Fontoura, M.P., Serôdio, P., Rodrigues, S. (2016). Portugal and Poland: Two Different Tales on Export Performance to the European Union in the 2000s. In: Bilgin, M., Danis, H. (eds) Entrepreneurship, Business and Economics - Vol. 2. Eurasian Studies in Business and Economics, vol 3/2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27573-4_30
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