LAUSR

In the last two decades, the Czech agrarian trade has undergone a very significant transformation. It had been considerably influenced by several dynamically developing factors, which originate not only in the area of economics, but also within the political and social sphere. The objective of this paper is to identify the roots of Czech agrarian trade competitiveness in relation to EU and non-EU countries. The results of comparative advantages analyses are discussed in relation to Czech agrarian trade nominal value and volume performance. The paper identifies the set of items when trade performance is induced by increasing volume (increasing exports in kg) and the set of items when trade performance is induced by increasing unit value performance. To accomplish the above mentioned tasks, the following methods have been applied: The LFI, RCA and TBI indices, product mapping and logarithmic decomposition. Based on individual applied methods the analyzed paper provides the results. However, Czech agricultural trade does not have comparative advantages in general (both in relation to EU and also non-EU countries), there are existing bilateral comparative advantages in the case of individual export items (non-EU: CN04, CN17, CN01, CN24, CN12, CN19, CN11, CN13 and CN18; EU: CN10, CN24, CN01, CN12, CN15, CN04, CN22, CN11, CN17, CN03, CN16, CN09, CN13 and CN14). The problems of Czech comparative advantages development in relation to the EU are constantly decreasing volume performance and decreasing unit value. On the other hand, in relation to non-EU countries, the relationship between increasing volume and value performance is more balanced and the comparative advantages are related to quality and higher added value aspects.