ABSTRACT
The Arab States trade (21 Countries) with the EU countries represents the largest proportion of their total trade with the whole world. It amounted to more than 60% in 2011. Even though, the share of EU-markets in Arab States agricultural exports declined to 33% in 2018 but has remained the first market in terms of the agricultural exports value of the Arab countries. The revolutionary movements in five Arab countries (Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Libya) which was called Arab-Spring has had dramatic impacts on the economies of those countries. Thereof, this study targeted a comprehensive evaluation of sustainable competitive agricultural exports to EU-markets through application of a model of four components. The first was estimation of the annual revealed comparative index (RCA) over two periods (2000-2010) representing the Pre-Arab-Spring era and (2011-2017) representing the Post-Arab-Spring era. Second was selecting the exported food commodity groups, from Arab-Spring States to EU- markets that recognized values of RCA index above one along the years of each period. Secondly, a time-trend model was estimated for each identified food commodity group along each period to estimate the annual change in the RCA. Thirdly, the annual average of RCA index of the selected food groups was compared among the concerned countries. Fourthly, the study estimated a stability coefficient for each identified exported food group of each named five countries. Five sources of data were used to build up the trade flow matrix of 10 food commodity groups of the concerned countries.
As Libya agricultural exports has not passed any of the four applied criteria the analysis identified Fish (Tunisia and Yemen, vegetables and fruits (Egypt, Tunisia and Syria), sugar and Honey (Egypt and Syria) and tea, cocoa and spices (Syria). However, only Egypt and Tunisia showed sustainable competitiveness during the Post-Arb-Spring era, even though at less criteria than the Pre-Arab-Spring era. The sustainable competitiveness of all commodity groups but vegetables and fruits showed a declining performance either before or after the Arab-Spring era.
The study underlined the importance of coordination and integration of the exports policies among the four identified Arab countries to raise their sustainable competitiveness in the European markets. As the four countries enjoy diversification in climate, water, soil resources and location advantages, they can establish joint venture projects for grading packing processing, storage and transportation network.