TRADE POLICY AND EXPORT COMPETITIVENESS IN ALBANIA: AN ECONOMETRIC INVESTIGATION

This research explains the relationship between export volume and other key independent variables like the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), tariff changes, and GDP growth. The HHI, drawn from the World Integrated Trade Solution database, explains changes in market concentration and competitiveness, affecting export volumes. The paper will be looking at the effects of a change in tariffs from Macrotrends and how these changes impact export competitiveness and the flows of trade. GDP growth data from the Bank of Albania acts as a proxy for the general performance of the economy. Multiplicative Linear Regression analyzes the interaction and impacts of these variables on export volumes from 1997 to 2023. Descriptive statistics highlight the dataset characteristics, while correlation analysis seeks to find complex relationships among variables. The negative relationship, statistically significant, between export volume and both market concentration as captured by HHI and tariff rates, while there is no evident effect from GDP growth, emerges from the regression analysis. The results underline the responsiveness of export volume to changes in market structure and tariff policy and indicate that there would be limited power of GDP growth in the studied regression model.