The Investigation of the Foreign Trade Activities of Machine-Building Enterprises in Khmelnytskyi Region

The article deals with the questions concerning the analysis of the up-to-date state of export machine-building potential on the regional level. The main assignment of the investigation was the tendencies identification and the determination of the significant problems, which hinder the development of foreign trade activities of the enterprises in region. The changes in the geographical and product structures of export-import flows are investigated, and the essessment of intra-industry trade level based on the Grubel-Lloyd index is given. The scale and dynamics of total goods sales of the machine-building enterprises of the region are analyzed. The indicator of the foreign trade balance was rather high within all analyzed period of time that is negative phenomenon in terms of the strategic role of machine-building for the development of other industries. The ways to overcome the crisis phenomena in the industry, the means of foreign trade operations activization and the areas of export potential enhancement are proposed. We can conclude about geographical and product structures irrationality, their low diversification and orientation mainly to the customers from CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) and developing countries. In 2013 the first indications of improvement have been showed up, but it is too early now to talk about the crisis consequences overcoming and the stable tendency of export activities development in machine-building.