”Road to economic neutrality” – Eastern or Western opening?

By: Trademagazin Date: 2024. 10. 21. 23:59

An important element of the government’s economic strategy and communication for almost 15 years is the opening to the east, which has two main goals: to support the expansion of Hungarian companies in the rapidly growing markets of eastern countries, and to “attract” foreign direct capital investments (FDI) to Hungary. It is worth examining these plans through the changes in product and service exports, as well as the stock of direct capital investments.

Since 2010, the weight of the European Union within product exports has increased from 77% to 81%, to which, if we add the increase in the share of North America (United States, Canada, Mexico) from less than 3% to almost 5%, then we can see that a Western opening has taken place in the case of product exports. On the other hand, the share of exports to Asia decreased from 7% to below 5%, reaching the same level as the growing North American exports. There is no sign of the oft-claimed rise of China in the Hungarian export data: practically stagnant since 2010, the second most populous country in the world accounted for 0.2-0.35% of the total Hungarian product exports. The situation is no better with India, which has become the world’s most populous country, where the share has decreased from 0.4% to 0.3%.