Foreign trade changes and sectoral development: comparison of the Baltic countries
ENFor a country with exports as a driving force, the ability of exporters to deal with difficulties successfully is crucial. It involves abilities to retain existing and find new markets for their productions, as well as modification of products suitable to fulfill the desires of consumers, which is observable as a change in export structure. On the other hand, also structural analysis of import is significant to reveal, how a country ensures national economic development in global growth conditions. Vast number of studies is devoted to the analysis of export and import in relation to economic crisis. For example, Levchenko, Lewis and Tesar (2010) analyze U. S. export and import data disaggregated at the 6-digit NAICS level and find that sectors used as intermediate inputs experienced significantly higher percentage reductions in both imports and exports. Chor and Manova (2010) analyze export and import in connection with credit conditions. In Latvia export is analyzed mainly from the point of view of its competitiveness and quality. For example, Beņkovskis and Rimgailaite (2010) analyze detailed data on exports in order to evaluate its quality and variety, Beņkovskis (2012) analyzes competitiveness of Latvia’s exporters. The aim of the paper is to reveal structural changes in foreign trade of Latvia, in comparison with Lithuania and Estonia and as well as to obtain detailed and disaggregated information for modeling.Comparison of foreign trade structure and other indicators of the Baltic countries also provide information on how similar are these countries and whether it is useful to use data of Estonia and Lithuania to fill some data gaps regarding the Latvian economy. The structure of the paper is as follows: methodology (of analysis of foreign trade statistics and input-output data) and analysis and results. In the paper, the time period of 2000-2011 is analyzed. The major databases used in the research are Eurostat data base (including National Accounts, Input-Output data, Comtrade etc.) and the databases of national statistical bureaus (for instance, Latvia’s national statistical bureau (CSB)). Sectoral codes are given in Appendix 1 and 2. [p. 173-174].
