F15 - Economic IntegrationReturn

This paper reviews the agricultural sector performance of Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries, specifically the efficiency of agricultural production and the overall competitiveness of their agricultural sectors. The study uses data spanning the period from 2001 to 2019 to assess agricultural production performance, and from 2001 to 2021 to investigate the competitiveness of the agricultural sectors. Using Malmquist productivity indices, the findings reveal that while overall productivity has increased in SADC, with 11 out of 15 countries recording an upward trajectory during the review period, technological progress has regressed. The gains in productivity have been driven by technical efficiency rather than advancements in technology. On the other hand, the Normalized Revealed Comparative Advantage (NRCA) index shows that 11 out of the 16 SADC countries were competitive, especially among diversified economies like South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania, compared to less diversified countries. This demonstrates that diversification plays a critical role in resilience to shocks such as climate change, variability, and global commodity price fluctuations. The findings further reveal that mineral-rich countries have less competitive agricultural sectors, potentially reflecting the presence of Dutch disease. These findings highlight the need to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) not only to reduce the funding gap in the agricultural sectors of SADC countries but also to bring much-needed technological innovation that can drive agricultural productivity, meet the food needs of the fast-growing population, and contribute to the overall growth of their economies.

The enlargement of the European Union (EU) to include Central and South-Eastern European countries in 2004 and 2007 launched an integration process that unifies the economies and financial markets of member states and enables the convergence of these two areas. This study focuses on analyzing the development and similarity of the European insurance sector after the EU enlargement. We study 34 European insurance markets from 2004 until 2021 based on a certain set of indicators that characterize insurance markets, such as Insurance Density, Insurance Penetration and Gross Written Premiums to name a few. With a functional clustering method applied to such indicators, we try to reveal whether there are similarities between the individual countries that could explain the European insurance market homogeneity and convergence via the EU integration process. The proposed method has also a practical importance since it provides visualization of the clustering results through the construction of global envelopes. This study supports the works of EU policy makers that have a major impact on the ability of further integration of the European insurance market.Keywords: European insurance markets,