STRUCTURE AND CONVERGENCE OF AGRO-FOOD TRADE OF CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES WITH THE EUROPEAN UNION DURING PRE-ACCESSION

The authors analyse agro-food trade structures of Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) with the European Union (EU-15) market to identify the specialisation patterns during the pre-accession using different trade indices. The analyses assess whether these patterns in the CEECs agro-food trade structures indicate convergence of the agro-food trade specialisation. They find that CEECs agro-food export has converged towards greater structural similarity with the EU-15 market, but less in high and very high quality differentiated agro-food products. This implies some of the CEECs pre-accession integration difficulties with higher valued agro-food products on the EU-15 market during adjustments and structural changes of CEECs' agro-food export patterns towards more competitive EU-15 market.