Evaluating the Competitiveness of Wood Processing Industry

Wood processing industry (WPI) is a sector based on renewable natural resources of wood raw material. It can, therefore, provide sustainable growth and be competitive on the international markets. The interest of the European Union is to build economy based on renewable natural resources, meaning that it is necessary to pay increased attention to the development and support of the WPI. The aim of the article is to evaluate and compare the level and development of competitiveness of WPI in the Czech and Slovak Republics for a ten year period through the establishment of indicators based on foreign trade data of industry using mathematical and statistical methods. To reach the goal, a system of indicators measuring sectoral competitiveness was set up under the hypothesis: in the WPI the potential of competitiveness is used deficiently. The resulting indicators have confirmed the hypothesis and shown that, despite the fact that the WPI creates active foreign trade balance and contributes to surplus balance of the country, it achieves low values of indicators implying comparative advantage with a negative, decreasing trend, consequently meaning that industry gradually loses its competitive ability. The analysis also showed that the reason for low competitive ability of WPI is low specialization of the country in the commodity group, which was confirmed by statistical method of correlation analysis.