| Abstract [eng] |
The thesis examines the concept and main determinants of country's competitiveness. Taking export as the most important factor and a proxy for country's competitiveness, a three-dimensional gravity modelling (country, time and product) and the networks theory is applied to investigate Lithuania’s export competitiveness. The research examines which factors were the most important for the development of Lithuania's export network, how the influence of these factors changed throughout the years, and how the global economic crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic affected Lithuania’s export structure. Analysis reveals that during the first years of opening to the foreign trade cultural and historical factors were the most important. In later years we see the domination of economic factors as well as the increase of the importance of friends-of-friend search and clustering of the destination markets. Results suggest that Lithuania’s export was resilient to the economic shock caused by the pandemic. Although the effects of Covid-19 were heterogeneous, the pandemic year did not have any significant impact on Lithuania’s export structure either in terms of the export goods, or in terms of the export markets. |
