THE IMPACT OF COMPETITIVENESS ON EXPORT PERFORMANCE OF THE REPUBLIC OF MACEDONIA

Abstract

The benefits of the increased competitiveness are discussed in the context of the superior national productivity, achieving higher GDP growth, but as well higher export with positive implications on the trade and current account balance. The Republic of Macedonia, as a small an open economy, continuously works on improving its national competitiveness, which in parallel with the aspiration towards the EU accession process, became its strategic interest too. Although in the recent decade, there is a trend of improved competitiveness in Republic of Macedonia, the progress is much slower than in other EU countries with limited impact on its export performance. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to analyze   if the competitiveness made an impact on different aspect of export performance such as: export growth, export market size growth, as well as trade and current account balance. Using the trend and regression analysis, for the period 2005-2015, this paper presents that there is still positive correlation between competitiveness and the exports of goods and services but close to the critical level of t-value (2,25) and the statistical significance of 95%.However the exports  growth and other export performance indicators show  some discrepancies from the basic findings,  which are in details presented in the paper.

Keywords

• competitiveness
• export growth
• market share growth
• trade balance

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