scholarly journals Agri-food trade of the new member states since the EU accession

2013 ◽  
Vol 59 (No. 3) ◽  
pp. 101-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Török ◽  
A. Jámbor

In 2004 and 2007, twelve New Member States (NMS) joined the European Union (EU), causing several changes in the field of agriculture. One of the major changes was the transformation of the national agri-food trade. The aim of the paper is to analyse the effects of the EU accession on the NMS agri-food trade, especially considering the revealed comparative advantages. The results suggest that the intensity of the NMS agri-food trade has increased significantly after the accession, though there was a serious deterioration in the NMS agri-food trade balance in most cases. It has also become evident that the NMS agri-food trade was highly concentrated by country and by product, though the concentration has not changed significantly after the EU accession. Moreover, our analyses highlight one of the most important characteristics of the NMS agri-food trade structure – the focus on the agri-food raw materials in export together with the agri-food processed products in import. As to the NMS agri-food trade specialisation, the diversity among member states becomes apparent. Almost all countries experienced a decrease in their comparative advantage after the accession, though it still remained at an acceptable level in most cases. As for the stability of the comparative advantage, the results suggest a weakening trend, underpinned by the convergence of the pattern of revealed comparative advantage. By estimating the survival function to the sample, it can be observed that the accession has radically changed the survival time of agri-food trade, meaning that the revealed comparative advantage has not turned out to be persistent in the period analysed. From the policy perspective, there is a clear need for structural changes in the NMS agriculture and agri-food sector in order to tackle the negative tendencies of the national agri-food trade. The most important long-term goal should be the production and export of higher value-added processed products based on domestic raw materials.  

2006 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-43
Author(s):  
Sándor Richter

The order and modalities of cross-member state redistribution as well as the net financial position of the member states are one of the most widely discussed aspects of European integration. The paper addresses selected issues in the current debate on the EU budget for the period 2007 to 2013 and introduces four scenarios. The first is identical to the European Commission's proposal; the second is based on reducing the budget to 1% of the EU's GNI, as proposed by the six net-payer countries, while maintaining the expenditure structure of the Commission's proposal. The next two scenarios represent radical reforms: one of them also features a '1% EU GNI'; however, the expenditures for providing 'EU-wide value-added' are left unchanged and it is envisaged that the requisite cuts will be made in the expenditures earmarked for cohesion. The other reform scenario is different from the former one in that the cohesion-related expenditures are left unchanged and the expenditures for providing 'EU-wide value-added' are reduced. After the comparison of the various scenarios, the allocation of transfers to the new member states in terms of the conditions prevailing in the different scenarios is analysed.


2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 194-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
Štefan Bojnec ◽  
Imre Fertő

The purpose of this research is to provide insight into the export competitiveness of meat products of the European Union (EU-27) member states on global markets. The revealed comparative advantage index is used to analyze the levels, compositions, and evolutions in patterns of development in the export competitiveness of meat products and their levels of stability at the product level. Except for some niche meat products, a larger number of the EU-27 member states have experienced comparative disadvantages on global markets over the analysed years of 2000 to 2011. The revealed comparative advantages on the global markets are the most robust for Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Denmark, Poland, Cyprus and Hungary. The revealed comparative advantage indices and their survival rates differ across the meat product groups. The heterogeneity in export competitiveness of the EU-27 member states suggests the importance of the differentiation of meat products in competitive export specialization on global markets.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (20) ◽  
pp. 11235
Author(s):  
Tamás Mizik

Being competitive in the international agri-food trade is an important aim of every country. It should be noted that this term has neither a commonly accepted definition nor a synthetized index to quantify it. The most commonly used indices in the international literature are the Balassa index and its modified versions (revealed trade advantage, revealed competitiveness, normalized revealed comparative advantage, and revealed symmetric comparative advantage) and different export and/or import-related indices (e.g., the Grubel–Lloyd index or the trade balance index). Based on a systematic review of the literature, these measurements were identified along with the major factors suggested for higher agri-food trade competitiveness. It seems that supportive legislation and/or (trade) policy is the most crucial factor, followed by higher value-added/more sophisticated goods, and high, efficient, and profitable production. Although the EU and its member states were overrepresented in the analyzed literature, the candidate countries, as well as other important trading partners of the EU, e.g., Canada, China, or the ASEAN countries, were also analyzed. Thus, some of these findings may be generalized.


Author(s):  
Christian Klesse

The accession of ten new member states has opened up new political and discursive spaces for challenging homo-, bi-, and transphobia in the new member states and the European Union (EU) as a whole. There has been widely felt sense of hope that the accession will ultimately increase the possibilities of political action, result in democratisation, and better the political conditions for sexual minorities to fight discrimination and struggle for equal treatment before the law (ILGA Europe 2001, Vadstrup 2002, Pereira 2002, Neumann 2004, ILGA 2004, Stonewall 2004). Such sentiments were also expressed in the call-for-papers for the Conference ‘Europe without Homophobia. Queer-in(g) Communities’ that took place from May 24 to May 26, 2004 at Wroclaw in Poland, for which I wrote the first draft of this paper. Participants were asked to reflect upon ‘how we can contribute to making sexual minorities in the European Community visible, heard, safe, and equal before the law’ and to ‘investigate the practical ways (including legal actions, information campaigns, political participation, etc.) of achieving the bold vision suggested in the title: Europe without homophobia’ (Organizing Committee 2004). Human rights groups and lesbian and gay organisations both in the (prospective) new and the already existing member states sensed that access to funding by EU bodies and the ability to address political and/or legal institutions of the EU (and/or the Council of Europe) opened up ‘new space’ for political activism and enabled access to a new range of political discourses and strategies (cf. Stychin 2003). Already many years before accession, human rights organisations and lesbian and gay campaigning groups started to utilise the transformative potential of this prospective economic-political and socio-legal change for campaigns against human rights abuse and legal discrimination on the grounds of gender and sexuality in states applying for accession. ILGA Europe, for example, emphasised that accession should be made dependent on the applying states complying to the high human rights standard that the EU is supposed to stand for. Due to the uneven power structure between the institutions of the EU and the states applying for membership, the logic and rhetoric of ‘enlargement’ structured the negotiations about accession. The power imbalances at the heart of the process are further indicated by the fact that accession is frequently discussed in the scientific literature in the terminology of ‘Europeanization’ (cf. Schimmelfenning and Sedelmeier 2005a). In this context, ‘Europeanization’ signifies ‘integration’ into the economic organisations and politico-legal institutions of the EU, a process that, according to Schimmelfenning and Sedelmeier, can be characterised as ‘a massive export of EU rules’ (2005b: 221). Because accession has been such a recent moment in history, research on the effects of the EU enlargement on the national polities of the new or prospective member states is still scarce. In particular, sexual politics has remained an under-researched topic (for an exception, see Stychin 2003). However, there is sufficient reason to speculate that accession will significantly affect the discourses and strategies of social movements struggling around sexuality and gender in the new member states. Even if it cannot be predicted at this stage, how political actors and social movements will respond and position themselves with regard to these newly emerging ‘political opportunity structures’ (Kriesi et al. 1995), the evolving institutional, economic, and discursive context will without any doubt impact on their politics.


2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Berrittella ◽  
Filippo Alessandro Cimino

AbstractThe literature on the European Union Emission Trading System (EU ETS) is by now very rich. Much is known about the efficiency, the effectiveness, and the environmental and distributional impacts of the EU ETS. Less, however, is known about the carousel value-added-tax (VAT) fraud phenomena in the European carbon market. This article evaluates the welfare effects of carousel VAT fraud in the EU ETS using a computable general equilibrium (CGE) analysis. According to our findings, if VAT fraud occurs in the EU ETS, the effects on welfare for the EU Member States are negative, with welfare loss significantly higher than the VAT fraud value. This article also discusses the reverse charge mechanism that EU Member States could adopt to reduce the VAT fraud phenomena in the European carbon market.


2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paweł Borys ◽  
Piotr Ciżkowicz ◽  
Andrzej Rzońca

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Radka MacGregor Pelikánová

Research background: The Post-Lisbon EU aims at smart, sustainable, and inclusive growth on the single internal market, as indicated by the Europe 2020. The interplay of the competition and consumer protection on such a market is subject to harmonization. The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive has been made in order to achieve a full harmonization in this respect in 2007. However, EU member states share different social, political, legal and economic traditions and their approaches to unfair competition, in particular if committed via parasitic commercial practices, are dramatically diverse. In such a context, is it feasible, effective and efficient to install a full harmonization?Purpose of the article: The primary purpose of this article is to describe and assess ap-proaches to unfair competition, in particular if committed via parasitic commercial practices, by the EU law and EU member states law. The secondary purpose is to study and evaluate possibilities for the feasible, effective and efficient harmonization, or their lack. Methods: The cross-disciplinary and multi-jurisdictional nature of this article, and its dual purposes, implies the use of Meta-Analysis, of the critical comparison of laws and the impact of their application, to the holistic perception of historical and national contexts, and to case studies. The primary and secondary sources are explored and the yield knowledge and data are confronted with the status quo. The dominating qualitative research and data are complemented by the quantitative research and data.Findings & Value added: The EU opted for an ambitious challenge to install via the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive a full harmonization of the regime against unfair commercial practices, including parasitic ones. The exploration pursuant to the duo of purposes suggests that the challenge is perhaps too ambitious and that the EU underestimated the dramatic diversity of approaches to unfair commercial practices, especially parasitic ones.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-37
Author(s):  
Deimantė Krisiukėnienė ◽  
Vaida Pilinkienė

AbstractResearch purpose. The research purpose is to assess and compare the competitiveness of the EU creative industries’ export.Design/Methodology/Approach. The article is organised as follows: Section 1 presents a short theoretical conception of creative industries; Section 2 presents the theoretical background of trade competitiveness indices; Section 3 introduces the research data set, method and variables; Section 4 discusses the results of the revealed comparative advantage index analysis; and the final section presents the conclusions of the research. It should be noted that the research does not cover all possible factors underlying the differences in the external sector performance and thus may need to be complemented with country-specific analysis as warranted. Methods of the research include theoretical review and analysis, evaluation of comparative advantage indices and clustering.Findings. The analysis revealed that the EU countries may gain competitiveness because of the globalisation effects and the development of creative industries. The increase in the revealed comparative advantage (RCA) index during the period 2004–2017 shows rising EU international trade specialisation in creative industries. According to dynamic RCA index results, France, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain has competitive advantage in creative industries sectors and could be specified as ‘rising stars’ according to dynamic of their export.Originality/Value/Practical implications. A creative industries analysis is becoming increasingly relevant in scientific research. Fast globalisation growth affects the processes in which closed economies together with their specific sectors are no longer competitive in the market because productivity of countries as well as particular economic sectors depends on international trade liberalisation, technology and innovation. Scientific literature, nevertheless, contains a gap in the area of international trade competitiveness research in creative industries sector.


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