Analysis of competitiveness against foreign trade for the market for cocoa, natural honey and onion in Honduras 2006-2019

Abstract

In this research, the competitiveness of Honduran exports of cocoa, natural honey and onion was studied; for this analysis, the export competitiveness index was calculated according to the Bela Balassa approach, commonly known as Revealed Comparative Advantage (VCR ); This methodology was applied to compare the amount of exports of a given product from a country with respect to total exports sent to the world and, in turn, the result obtained for other competing countries was compared. The study was carried out considering that the main objective of the research is to explain the main findings on the behavior of the results obtained by the VCR index of exports for Honduras, compared with the commercial partners of Central America. The results obtained showed that Honduras does not have VCR in the exports of the analyzed products compared to the Central American countries; However, the country in the region with the best competitiveness results for the onion market was Guatemala. On the other hand, Nicaragua was the most competitive country in cocoa exports and El Salvador showed the best results for natural honey.