Export Comparative Advantage Analysis of Iranian Hen Egg by RCA & RSCA and RC Criteria

The potential impact of a liberalization of global trade on developing nations is a controversial subject. The liberaliza-tion of global agricultural trade, in particular, has been the focus of the debate for many years now and is part of the current WTO negotiations. Trade policies are believed to have influenced a country’s comparative advantage. Comparative advantage as a concept for evaluating the patterns of trade, is widely accepted and often used in theoretical and policy discussions. Livestock and livestock products, in the global trade, account for about one sixth, by value, of all agricultural trade. Iran is the one of main producers of hen egg in the world (FAO, 2004). Higher-than-global cost prices are the main disadvantage of the Iranian hen egg industry. The industry comprises of 700 million broiler day-old chicks, 10 million broiler breeders and 50 million layer day-old chicks. Hen egg is one of the Livestock products which are part of the non-oil export in Iran and its export consistently faces with fluctuation during last years. This paper looks at the performance of hen egg export and examines the comparative advantages indices like: revealed comparative advantage (RCA), revealed symmetric comparative advantage (RSCA) and (revealed competitive advantage(RC) for Iran and world main producers over the period 1990-2005. The source of data from 1990-2005 are supplied by F.A.O (2006). The changes in Iran’s export structure were compared with main producers ones. The results of the research showed, the trade and production policies and economic behavior of producers and exporters have been in such a way that they could not show a appropriate and timely response of world, also the re-vealed instabilities in the trends of RCA, RSCA and RC indices during the study period led to the conclusion that there is no well defined strategy and plan for utilization of low price production factors, effectiveness human power, knowledge of bargaining power and target markets. The objective of this paper is to try to identify: 1) The export comparative advantage of Iranian hen egg; 2) Its changing during the time; 3) The comparative advantage of Iranian hen egg in competition with other countries which are famous in trade and production of hen egg.