Editor's Introduction

摘要

In the early transition, there was considerable pessimism about the ability of the transition economies to compete on international markets. Many observers viewed the initial structure of exports from these countries, based mainly on resource and labor-intensive products, as evidence of comparative advantages in goods whose global markets were stagnant and whose production in the transition economies faced bleak prospects. Despite these unpromising beginnings, many of the transition economies were able to make the shift to more skill- and innovation-intensive products, whereas others benefited from rising commodity prices on world markets. In the first paper, Imre Fertoe and Karoly Attila Soos examine the comparative advantage of transition economies and compare it to that of the "older" EU member countries. They find that even in the more recent past, the comparative advantage of transition economies shows significant shifts over relatively short periods of time, suggesting that comparative advantage continues to move from sector to sector. The empirical findings are robust, but there is little theoretical underpinning for the explanations of this phenomenon. It certainly is not consistent with the tenets of the Heckscher-Ohlin (HO) theory, and the available theories that posit a more dynamic evolution of comparative advantage lack the HO theory's robust predictive powers, in part because they tend to be more ad hoc and serve as an ex post rationalization of trade patterns than as a basis for projecting from country characteristics to national comparative advantage.