Revealed Comparative Advantage And Trade Competitiveness In Global Vegetable Products

The role of comparative advantage has great significance in guiding international trade and business. The closed economies which create artificial barriers to trade and commerce hardly benefit by pursuing such restrictive policies. The objective of the article was to evaluate the revealed comparative advantages RCA of global vegetable trade as well as the stability and duration of Balassa indices by employing Kaplan-Meier survival function and Markov transition probability matrices. Findings reveal that Netherlands Spain and Mexico were the major exporters of the selected vegetables in the period evaluated together giving 54 of all products exported the top10 countries therefore consisted 74 of concentration dominated by the fresh or chilled tomatoes which accounts for more than 40 of trade among the examined products for all the periods analysed. The Balassa indices nonetheless were the highest for Spain and Thailand. Generally comparative advantages seem to have weakened for most of the countries as demonstrated by the stability tests and mobility indices.