Similarity assessment of the commodity structure of foreign trade in the European Union countries

Abstract

An important element of the foreign trade research is an analysis of its commodity and geographical structure. A method of examining the similarity of foreign trade structure was proposed in this article and applied on the example of certain EU countries. The aim of this article is to assess the degree of similarity of foreign trade structures and to indicate the extent to which it reflects differences in economic development. The study was conducted with the use of an original indicator of commodity structure similarity and a hierarchical cluster analysis for the period 2006—2015. It enabled to identify the most similar countries in terms of foreign trade structure. Data for the computations were obtained from the Eurostat. The obtained results proved that countries with similar economic potential have a similar foreign trade structure.