The diploma thesis deals with the impact of innovative assets on the foreign trade of a selected food business. On the basis of theoretical part, an analysis is made of the selected company, which consists of a financial analysis, PESTE analysis, Porter's analysis, competition analyses and analyses of specific innovations. At the end of a thesis, the results achieved are evaluated. At the same time, solutions are proposed to improve the current state of innovation in the company under observation.

This thesis examines the impact of environmental regulations on trade competitiveness for South Asian countries. The study further investigates whether South Asian countries have become a pollutive haven of industrial exports to OECD countries during 1984-2004. The thesis also analyses whether tariff walls created by the governments to offsets stringent environmental regulations negatively affect pollutive industrial trade flows. This study has identified gaps in the literature after critically reviewing both competing trade theories and empirical literature surrounding the subject. Firstly, most of the empirical literature on the subject has focused on developed countries while ignoring less developed regions like South Asia. Second, several studies concluded trade competitiveness impact of environmental policy following a single estimation method when results are sensitive to the choice of the method used. Hence, for robust results, cross-methods analysis was imperative. Thirdly, the empirical literature on the subject focused on most pollutive industries and ignored the research on somewhat pollutive and least pollutive sectors as well as comparative analysis between those industries. This study has contributed to the literature by filling these gaps. Following the neo-classical theory, the central hypothesis of this thesis is that environmental regulations negatively affect different categories of pollutive industrial export competitiveness. By using the highest dis-aggregated ISIC level trade data and incorporating other socio-economic variables, this study has deployed comparative advantage trade models by Balassa (1965), competitiveness indicator by XU (1999), and bilateral RCA model by Grether and de Melo (2004). The study used the gravity model to control for un-observed effects over time on trade flows while capturing environmental regulations impact on pollutive industrial trade competitiveness. Accordingly, to avert endogeneity/data sensitivity issues and to ascertain robust estimates, the present research has among others computed Random Effect and Newey-West standard error models. The statistical modeling results show that while India gained trade competitiveness in most pollutive industrial trade, Pakistan and Bangladesh lost their trade competitiveness in the same category. The research finds evidence of most pollutive industries of South Asian countries increasing their bilateral RCAs and exports with OECD countries and reset of the world. A comparative analysis between most pollutive to less pollutive industries showed a lack of support for any systematic specialization patterns of trade for South Asia during 1984-2004. Nonetheless, this study findings based on gravity modeling clearly depicted a statistically significant negative impact of environmental regulations on total exports, most pollutive exports, and less pollutive industrial exports for South Asia and OECD countries. This study rejected the pollution haven hypothesis between South Asian pollutive industrial exports with OECD. It further concluded that tariff barriers created by countries to offsets environmental regulation costs would prove counterproductive to competitiveness. At the policy level, instead of lobbing for protectionism to balance out environmental regulatory costs, the governments in both developed and developing countries need to focus on forming better environmental policies fostering both competitiveness and environmental quality. Also, trade-offs between environmental regulations and competitiveness are challenging situations for South Asia and OECD countries. Therefore, sustainable production and trade policies combined with innovative and cost-effective environmental policies are needed to accomplish environmental gains and competitiveness.

Magister Commercii - MCom / Issues pertaining to the misalignment of exchange rate have become central in the analysis of open economy macroeconomics for developing countries. This is at least due to two reasons: first persistent overvaluation of currency is seen as a powerful early warning of potential currency crisis and second protracted periods of exchange rate misalignment are highly associated with poor economic performance in a number of developing countries. Owing to this fact, economists are in concession that aligning real exchange rates towards their equilibrium values is an important component of macroeconomic policy adjustments in order to achieve and maintain a sustainable development. For this purpose the estimation of the degree of the real exchange rate misalignment has become pivotal. However, despite the concession among economists regarding the need to minimize the frequency and magnitude of exchange rate misalignment, the estimation of the equilibrium exchange rate (hence the misalignment) has been among the most controversial and challenging issues in modem macroeconomics. For several decades, the Purchasing power parity (PPP) approach-which is based on the law of one price-has been the most widely used methodology for the estimation of the equilibrium exchange rate in both developed and developing countries. In South Africa some attempts have been made to estimate the misalignment of the rand against major currencies on the basis of the PPP approach. However, large numbers of empirical studies show that PPP does not hold except in the 'ultra' long run. In addition, PPP's assumption of a constant equilibrium exchange rate makes it ill-fitted to serve as a bench-mark for the analysis of the exchange rate in countries such as South Africa that experience substantial structural changes. As a result a number of macro-econometric models underlying on the macroeconomic determinants of exchange rate have been developed, albeit with little applicability in developing countries. In this study, we have used Edwards' (1989) intertemporal general equilibrium model of a small open economy in order to estimate the degree of the real exchange rate misalignment and its impact on the international trade competitiveness of the South African economy for the period 1985:1-2000:4. For this purpose a dynamic single equation error correction model of a first order autoregressive distributed lag model, ADL (1,1), and five years moving average technique have been employed to estimate the exchange rate misalignment. Whereas impulse response analysis and variance decomposition techniques of a cointegrated VAR (vector auto regression) have been established to assess the impact of the misalignment on trade competitiveness. The fmdings of the study reveal that the real exchange rate had been consistently overvalued during the period' 1988:3-1998:2 but undervalued during periods 1998:3- 2000:4. For most of the periods during 1985:1-1988:2 the rand had been undervalued. More over the study discloses that exchange rate misalignment debilitates South Africa's international trade competitiveness accounting for 20 percent of the variation in competitiveness.

The main purpose of this dissertation is to explore the trade potentials between Central and Eastern Europe countries and China. According to the collected information and data, this dissertation believes that although there are some shortcomings in the trade between CEE countries and China, CEE countries' trade potentials with China are relatively high. This is because, on the one hand, by observing the trend of the trade development in the past ten years, it could be found that the trade scale between CEE countries and China has been continuously increasing. Combined with the trade competitiveness and trade complementarity between CEE countries and China, this dissertation believes that the practical basis for trade cooperation between CEE countries and China is relatively strong. For example, Latvia has an obvious competitive advantage and trade complementarity in crude materials, inedible, except fuels (SITC 2). On the other hand, according to the trade potential ratios calculated by the trade gravity model, the overall trade potential ratios between CEE countries and China are not significantly high, which suggests that CEE countries and China still have strong trade potentials in export and import trade. Keywords: Central and Eastern Europe countries, China, trade potential, trade gravity...

Magister Legum - LLM