Книги

The collapse of the former Soviet Union has led to a sharp decline in the trading of agricultural products between its successor states. There have been attempts to revive these trade relations by means of bilateral and regional trade agreements. In addition, almost all member states of the CIS are in the process of negotiating accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). Because of its size and agricultural production potential, the Russian Federation is of primary importance in this respect. The integration of the Russian Federation in the world economy, which is expected to result from its accession to the WTO, will have a sizeable impact not only on its own agricultural sector, but also on the world markets for agricultural products.

We analyse the evolving pattern of Hungary.s agri-food trade using recently developed empirical procedures based on the classic Balassa index and its symmetric transformation. The extent of trade specialisation exhibits a declining trend; Hungary lost comparative advantage for a number of product groups over the 1990s. The indices of specialisation have also tended to converge. For particular product groups, the picture is mixed: indices are reasonably stable for product groups with comparative disadvantage, but those with weak to strong comparative advantage show significant variation. The results reinforce the finding of a general decrease in specialisation, but do not support the idea of self-reinforcing mechanisms, emphasised strongly in much of the endogenous growth and trade literature.

As regards EU accession of Hungary one of the most important questions is how the adaptation of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) will affect the competitiveness of the Hungarian agriculture. Competitive effects of CAP can be revealed in several ways (quantitative, comparative analysis, simulations etc.) but the results may differ significantly. That is why it is interesting to compare the results of different methods.

This paper concentrates on the competitive effects of changing trade policy by comparing the results of comparative analyses (producer prices, export subsidy systems and import protection) and simulations. The results of the simulation confirm the conclusion that the CAP adaptation will favour basically the cereal production. CAP adaptation will intensify the already existing (competitive) differences between the two large sectors of agriculture (plant and animal products). All of the analyses came to the conclusion that the prospects of arable crops are favourable. Less reassuring are the prospects of animal products. There are apparent efficiency problems, and rising feed costs (due to accession) may further weaken the position of this sector. Without basic structural reforms the sustainability of the sector’s competitiveness is questionable.

Intra-industry trade in agri-food products between Hungary and the EU is shown to be low and dominated by vertically rather than horizontally differentiated products, suggesting higher economic adjustment costs. Following recent empirical studies, we then test econometrically for the determinants of this trade using different measures of horizontal and vertical trade, and employing an array of popular explanatory variables. Results suggest that separating the measure of intra-industry trade into vertical and horizontal provides for better estimation and supports the contention that the determinants may differ by type of trade. In the regression analysis, the level of intra-industry trade is found to serve as a better dependent variable than the degree or share of intra-industry trade.