The competitiveness of French exports of animal products

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The aim of the paper is to measure the competitiveness of French exports of animal products, relative to its foreign competitors, based on a shift-share approach. We compare results across groups of products and with respect to France’s main competing countries within and outside the European Union. Over the 2000-2016 period, France lost half of its market share in animal products, considerably more than its main European competitors. Still, only half of these losses can be explained by drop in competitiveness. Negative structural effects explain the other half. More specifically, French exports suffer from a concentration to destinations with a slowly growing demand, both on the global and on the European market. The product structure of French exports is weakly adapted to the European import demand. Market share and competitiveness losses suffered by France are the largest for poultry and pork products, while the French diary sector shows the strongest resilience.