Factors of foreign trade resilience on the example of the North Europe countries. Ability to recover

Abstract

The article analyses the factors of foreign trade resilience of countries, as well as makes their quantitative assessment on the example of the North Europe countries. These factors are divided into two large groups: reflecting the country's resilience and characterising its ability to recover. The factors described in this article are divided into congenital and acquired. This article is devoted to the analysis of only those factors that characterise the ability to recover. Mutual trade dependence and flexibility of the structure of the economy of the exporter's home region are identified as innate. And as acquired - diversification of trade relations, redundancy in the trading network, its modularity. Indicators to help characterise these factors are calculated for the North Europe countries. As a result, a picture of foreign trade resilience was obtained in terms of the ability of these countries to recover after shocks. The import and export positions of Finland, Sweden and Denmark in this regard turned out to be quite strong. This situation has become possible due to their wide specialisation, high diversification of trade networks, as well as the high redundancy of the EU-27 trade network. The situation in Norway and Iceland appeared to be less stable due to the fact that they have a pronounced foreign trade specialisation. These factors should theoretically contribute to a relatively high rate of recovery of foreign trade of the country in question after shocks. This was confirmed by the correlation coefficient calculated for them and the elasticity of a foreign trade.