Russian Agrarian Foreign Trade Development – the Impact of Selected Factors

Abstract

Russian agricultural foreign trade is changing. Its value, volume and especially commodity and territorial structures are under the permanent development. The period of transformation together with several crises completely changed the character of Russian agricultural sector and foodstuff industry. To be able to develop the country‘s strategy for the upcoming decades it is necessary to identify the key trends and drivers affecting the Russian agricultural trade performance and development. The main objective of this paper is to analyze the influence of selected key variables (agricultural production, exchange rate, and world food price and government subsidies) on Russian agricultural trade and to identify if there is existing the significant relationship or not. The secondary objective of the paper is the analysis of relationship existence between Russian food price development and World food price development. On the basis of the results coming from the analyses the following can be highlighted. The value of imports was growing much faster comparing to value of exports. The result is constantly increasing negative trade balance. Russian agrarian export commodity structure became more concentrated, on the other hand the commodity structure of agrarian imports became more heterogeneous. Talking about individual hypotheses analyzing the relations between individual variables the following can summarized. There do exist the relationships between Russian foreign trade and agricultural production development, government subsidies development and world food price development. On the other hand the existence of relationship between exchange rate and Russian agrarian export and import performance was not proved.