APPROACHES TO IDENTIFYING COMPETITIVE SECTORS BASED ON INTERNATIONAL TRADE DATA.

ПОДХОДЫ К ВЫЯВЛЕНИЮ КОНКУРЕНТНОСПОСОБНЫХ ОТРАСЛЕЙ НА ОСНОВЕ ДАННЫХ МЕЖДУНАРОДНОЙ ТОРГОВЛИ

Тараскин Дмитрий Сергеевич

аспирант, Саратовский государственный университет генетики, биотехнологии и инженерии имени Н.И. Вавилова,

РФ, г. Саратов

ABSTRACT

The article presents an approach to identifying competitive agricultural sectors in Russia and investigates international and domestic approaches to competitiveness analysis.

АННОТАЦИЯ

В статье представлен подход к выявлению конкурентоспособных сельскохозяйственных отраслей в РФ и проанализированы международный и отечественный подходы к анализу конкурентоспособности.

Keywords: Competitiveness, export, agriculture.

Ключевые слова: Конкурентоспособность, экспорт, сельское хозяйство.

The agro-industrial complex is an important system-forming sector for the economy of any country in the world. The level of population's living standards, employment in the economy, and provision of essential products for life largely depend on the efficient functioning of this sphere.

Russia is one of the largest producers and exporters of agricultural products in the world. According to the Ministry of Agriculture of the Russian Federation, grain exports in the 2020-2021 agricultural year amounted to 49 million tons, including 37.6 million tons of wheat. The share of wheat from Russia in the structure of global exports in 2021 was approximately 18%. The high share of basic agricultural crops, which are important for many food products, in the structure of global exports indicates that the importance of Russia in ensuring food security cannot be overestimated.

The economic sanctions imposed on Russia in 2022 - 2023 have had a significant impact on the agro-industrial complex. Key challenges include: import restrictions in sectors supporting engineering, departure of foreign companies related to agriculture from Russia, disruption of sales and logistics chains, and limited access to global capital markets. The sanctions also include restrictions on the export of agricultural products and mineral fertilizers from the country. In these circumstances, threats arise to maintaining a positive trade balance and food security. Issues related to finding approaches to identifying new promising directions for the export of agricultural products are becoming increasingly relevant.

The author's approach to searching for reserves of agricultural export growth is based on the use of the theoretical and methodological foundation of the theory of competitive advantages in international trade, and in particular, the works of such foreign and Russian scientists as Balassa B., Wong P., Pavlak K., A. Gnidchenko, A. Mogilat, O. Mikheeva, and others.

The assessment of the competitiveness of goods in the international market has been and continues to be an attractive object for research. One of the early approaches to digital assessment of competitiveness is the index of competitive positions proposed by Balassa [2] - the Balassa Index.

where X – export, i – name of good, c – country, t – year

The indicator varies in the range of [0; +∞], and a value of the index greater than 1 indicates a competitive advantage.

The key advantage of this method is simplicity - exceeding the Balassa Index value of one is interpreted as a sign of a country's comparative advantage in international trade in a certain product. However, the index has several drawbacks that reduce the accuracy of the analysis:

• Inverse correlation between the value of the index and the number of exported goods: the values of small countries with a small range of exported goods will be overestimated;

• The index used to calculate competitive positions does not consider imports of goods. This drawback of the index does not allow for the re-export to be considered.

To some extent, to solve the problems presented above, the coefficient of trade imbalance was proposed UNIDO in 1982 [4]:

,

where X – export, M – import, i – name of good, c – country, t – year

The index ranges from [-1;1]. A value of the index between (0;1] indicates a competitive advantage.

The presented approach based on the coefficient of trade imbalance solves the problem of structural imbalances in the country's exports and considers imports of goods. However, the drawback of this approach is that it does not consider the nominal volumes of trade: the index ranges from -1 to 1 and can indicate a competitive advantage even with minimal export volumes of a product group.

To solve the above problems, Gnidenko [1] proposed an approach to calculating the coefficient of trade imbalance, which considers the normalization for the intensity of global trade relative to GDP.

,

where X – export, M – import, GDP – gross domestic product, i – name of good, c – country, t – year

The index ranges from [-∞;+∞], and a value of the index between (0;+∞) indicates a competitive advantage. A detailed analysis of the index values is carried out by comparing them with the index values of other product groups and the index values of product groups for other countries.

Based on the above, we have developed an approach to analyzing the competitive advantages of agricultural products in Russia, which includes the following steps.

Step 1: Data Source Selection. The export and import volume indicators of world trade by country serve as the initial data for analysis. The main source of the presented data available in the public domain is the United Nations Comtrade service. The advantage of this database is the representation of information on world trade for all countries in a single currency and in accordance with a single classification of goods - the Harmonized System (HS).

Step 2: Collecting data on agricultural products in Russia. The UN Comtrade database offers us the export with the detailing of product groups up to 6 digits - HS6. However, it is necessary to extract the product groups that need to be considered when analyzing agricultural products. For this purpose, we propose to use the study by Wang, P., Pawlac, K. [3], which, in their research of the Polish agricultural market, identify the following HS2 codes as selection criteria: 1-24, 50-53.

Step three: Calculation of the Balassa Index, trade imbalance, and Gnidchenko Index.

Step four: Identification of competitive sectors in agriculture based on calculated indexes. As noted earlier, the following index values indicate the presence of a competitive advantage:

• The Balassa Index ranges from 0 to +∞, and it is considered that a competitive advantage is achieved when the index exceeds 1;
• The trade imbalance index ranges from -1 to 1, and it is considered that a competitive advantage is achieved when the index values are between 0 and 1;
• The Gnidchenko Index ranges from -∞ to +∞, and it is considered that a competitive advantage is achieved when the index exceeds 0. To identify agriculture sectors with a competitive advantage, it is proposed to use an approach that simultaneously involves exceeding the Balassa and Gnidchenko indexes calculated for the units identified on the third step and a trade imbalance index of zero.

This methodological approach will help identify potential directions for intensifying the export flows of agricultural products from Russia.

References:

1. Gnidchenko A., Salnikov V. Net Comparative Advantage Index: Overcoming the Drawbacks of the Existing Indices. // NRU HSE Basic Research Program Working Paper WP BRP 119/EC/2015. Moscow: National Research University Higher School of Economics. 2015.
2. Balassa B. Trade Liberalization and Revealed Comparative Advantage // Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies. 1965. Vol. 33. № 2. Р. 99–123.
3. Pawlak K., Wang P.,Changes in Foreign Trade in Agricultural Products between China and Poland // Agricultural & Foresrty Economics and Management. 2019. Vol. 2. P. 1-10.
4. UNIDO Changing Patterns of Trade in World Industry: An Empirical Study on Revealed Comparative Advantage. 1982. New York: United Nations.