Post-crisis foreign trade trends and policies on the periphery of the European Union - comparison of the Iberian, Baltic and Central European region

The year of the great trade collapse in the world was 2009. The international crisis caused a shrinkage of domestic demand and general credit crunch. As a consequence, the growth-enhancing role of exports came into focus in most countries. Exports gained momentum from 2010 but with certain changes in structure and direction. Trade within global value chains has become more pronounced and non-EU markets were targeted by several firms. In certain countries it became a deliberate state policy to turn towards non-EU areas. On the one hand, our paper will describe government foreign trade strategies and institutional framework of the Iberian, Baltic and Central European countries, detecting possible similarities. On the other hand we will analyse the actual foreign trade data in the recent years; what are the main export products and services. Apart from desk research, our methodology consists of detailed trade data analysis from the Eurostat Comext database and service trade database. Based on these we can get a picture on the structure and direction of exports of the peripheric economies and this can be compared to the aims of the given states. Our preliminary hypothesis is that there is a gap between the reality and the intentions of the states. The size of this gap varies and is influenced by certain factors like the different involvement of multinational companies in the foreign trade or the different economic structure of these countries.