Competitiveness of Major Exporting Countries and Turkey in the World Fishery Market: A Constant Market Share Analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine whether and to what extent the shares of selected countries' fishery exports in the world markets reflect their international competitiveness. The Constant Market Share (CMS) model, which decomposes export growth into some broad components (i.e., structural effects, market effects, commodity effects and competitive effects), is applied to examine this issue. The results of decomposition analysis revealed that structural factors have been more significant in explaining the growth of exports. The growth effects, though, appeared positive for each country, the exports of open economies like Canada, the United States, Iceland and Turkey benefited more from the growth of world exports. The analysis of commodity composition and market effects suggests that countries like Canada, the United States, Iceland and Turkey were pursuing the product differentiation policy and were penetrating in those markets, which have been growing relatively faster. These countries remained committed throughout the sample period (i.e., 1980-2000) to export their diversified products in fast-growing markets. The analysis of competitiveness effects, which are derived as a residual, show that Norway, Spain, the United States, Indonesia, Thailand, sChile and China were strong fishery exporters and increased their competitiveness during the sample period.