Assessing Cambodia’s Agricultural Export Competitiveness: An Application of the Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) Index
Keywords:
Revealed Comparative Advantage, Agricultural Exports, Cambodia, Trade Competitiveness, and Balassa IndexAbstract
The Balassa Index illustrates Cambodia as having an intense and narrow agricultural export profile. The paper quantitatively analyses five main products such as rice, cashew nuts, cassava, bananas, and rubber. The research finds that Cambodia has a Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) in all of them. This is specially the case for cashew nuts (RCA: 143.1), rubber (RCA: 33.5), and rice (RCA: 11.2); which gives them a far more competitive standing in global markets for those products. Increased competitiveness is also found in bananas and, to lesser extent, cassava. Such results are direct confirmation of the theoretical predications for comparative advantage; which suggest that Cambodia’s export structure should look like it does give its endowment in land and labour. These relationships are significant for policy, indicating that strategic investments into the value chains of theses high-performance industries could potentially unlock additional export competitiveness as well as economic growth and rural livelihoods.
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