Competitiveness of agri-food foreign trade in conditions of the Slovak Republic

Abstract

The presented paper aims to evaluate the development and competitiveness of agri-food foreign trade of the Slovak Republic for the period 2016 – 2020. In the article, we present the priorities of Slovakia within the commodity structure. We use the RCA indicator to identify comparative advantages. In this paper, we also compare the actual and estimated development of agri-food foreign trade of the Slovak Republic in the years 2018 – 2020. Based on the reached results, we can state that we achieve an ever-increasing trade balance deficit in agri-food foreign trade. Produced results confirmed all the research assumptions presented in the paper. Despite the increase in export and import of agri-food products, the negative trade balance is still deeper. A significant deviation of real development from the predicted values can be explained by the influence of the worldwide pandemic of the coronavirus COVID-19, which slowed down the possible further development of agricultural trade.