Revealed Comparative Advantage (Balassa Index)

Compute the Revealed Comparative Advantage for a country's exports. RCA > 1 indicates the country has a comparative advantage in that product.

Usage

ct_rca(reporter, year = NULL, level = 2L, cache = TRUE)

Arguments

reporter: Character. Reporter country ISO3 code.
year: Integer. Year to query.
level: Integer. HS digit level: 2, 4, or 6. Default 2.
cache: Logical. Default TRUE.

Value

A data.frame with columns: commodity_code, commodity_desc, reporter_value, world_value, reporter_share, world_share, rca, has_advantage.

Details

The Balassa index is defined as: RCA = (country exports of product i / country total exports) / (world exports of product i / world total exports)

Examples

# \donttest{
op <- options(comtrade.cache_dir = tempdir())

rca <- tryCatch(ct_rca("AUS", year = 2023), error = function(e) NULL)
#> ℹ No API key set. Using preview endpoint (500 records max, no descriptions).
#> ℹ For full access (100k records, descriptions), get a free key at
#>   <https://comtradedeveloper.un.org/>
#> ℹ Then run: `ct_set_key("your-key")`
# Products where Australia has comparative advantage
if (!is.null(rca)) rca[rca$has_advantage, ]

options(op)
# }