Sectoral Analysis of Competitiveness of Wood Processing Industry in the Czech Republic

Abstract

Wood processing industry (WPI) is a sector based on renewable natural resources of wood raw material. It is therefore able of sustainable growth and be competitive on the international markets. The interest of the European Union is to build economy based on renewable natural resources, resulting in the need to pay increased attention to the development and support of the WPI. The aim of the paper is to evaluate the level and development of competitiveness of WPI in the Czech Republic in subsectoral structure for a period of ten years through the establishment of indicators based on foreign trade data of industry using mathematical and statistical methods. To reach the goal we set up a system of indicators measuring sectoral competitiveness. Achieved results in indicators have shown that, despite the WPI creates active foreign trade balance and contributes to surplus balance of country, it achieves low value of indicator revealed comparative advantage (RCA) with a negative, decreasing trend, thus industry gradually loses its competitive ability. Analysis was also found, that the reason for low competitive ability of WPI is low specialisation of country in the commodity group, which was confirmed by statistical method of correlation analysis.