COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE OF INTERNATIONAL TRADE OF THE EU-28 AND USA

This paper examines competitive advantage of international trade of the EU and USA as a comparative analysis between the mentioned trade partners. In the midst of preparations for the potential Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, it is necessary to examine the sectoral competitiveness of EU in relation with its trade partner-the USA. For this purpose in our analysis we have used Balassa's index as a measure of competitive advantage (CTA). Though this approach is wroldwide used in literature, we aware that this index has some empirical lack but it give us a feature of gross sectoral competiveness of examined country or group of countries. According to our empirical analyses we found that though the EU-28 have a competitive advantages, according to Balassa's index in the global level, in less groups of commodities (32 groups of two digits SITC commodities) than the USA (40 groups of two digits SITC commodities).