Poland’s Extra-EU Trade After the EU Accession

Abstract

When Poland joined the European Union (EU) on May 1, 2004, it transferred its national competences in the field of external trade policy to the EU institutions. As a result, on the one hand, as of that date Poland may neither change duties on goods imported from outside of the EU, nor may it conclude trade agreements with third countries. Nowadays, Poland’s intra-EU trade has reached ca. 65-75% of its total foreign trade at the expense of the exchange with the rest of the world. Although the aforementioned numbers are high, they have not changed substantially since Poland’s accession to the EU. However, due to the legal circumstances and limited national competences in the shaping of external trade relations, one could expect that geographic and product structure of Polish foreign trade havr changed and reshuffled over the last few years. Therefore, the article aims to identify changes in both directions and products in Poland’s extra-EU imports and exports since the EU accession. To this end, we analysed changes in the value of Poland’s foreign trade with partners from outside of the EU as well as some indices that show the concentration of Poland’s trade and similarities or differences to the EU average. In order to get a closer look at Poland’s position, we compared the aforementioned indices to those reported for other Visegrád Group (V4) countries. We examined changes that took place in the period of 2004-2019 and have identified trends in Poland’s extra-EU trade that provide evidence of its greater similarity to the EU average, an effect of EU integration and higher diversification in the mix of partners from outside the EU.