International Trade Patterns Over The Last Four Decades: How Does Portugal Compare With Other Cohesion Countries?

This paper compares the international trade pattern of Portugal with the other three EU15 Cohesion countries - Spain, Greece and Ireland - over the last forty years. The paper adopts a fact-finding approach, investigating the degree of openness of these economies and making extensive use of the standard Balassa (1965) index to assess the technological content of these countries' manufacturing trade. In order to infer on international trade specialization and on the persistence of trade patterns, the paper provides empirical evidence on the shape of the cross-sector distribution of 120 manufacturing exports and examines the intra-distribution dynamics.