Agriculture export variety and the short and long run impact on agriculture export

Abstract

In this paper, we investigated the extent to which the accession to the EU has had an effect on increasing the variety of exports of agri-food categories for two Eastern European countries, namely Romania and Bulgaria. We also assessed the impact of changes in the variety of exports of agri-food categories on the dynamics of the volume of exports of agri-food products for these two countries and used the entropy to measure the variability of exports of agri-food products by categories. The results confirm the important role played by related variety in increasing a country's long-term exports of agri-food products and show that the high concentration of exports on a small number of categories of agri-food products that include mostly agricultural raw materials cannot ensure a sustainable increase in the export of agri-food products for Romania. In the case of Bulgaria, the related variety has a positive impact on ensuring a sustainable increase in agri-food exports. The accession to the EU was an important factor for the increase of the exported agri-food goods for Romania while in the case of Bulgaria, the accession to the EU did not mark a positive or negative shock on the volume of exports of agri-food products.

Keywords

• agri-food exports
• concentration of exports
• related variety
• unrelated variety