EU membership and exports competitiveness – benchmarking exports structures of Poland and Slovakia versus Bulgaria and Romania, and their convergence to the German pattern in the years 2000–2014

The competitiveness of a nation is associated with a set of characteristics that enable structural adjustments to global technological trends and improvement of living standards. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the competitiveness of Poland and Slovakia (in the EU since 2004) versus Bulgaria and Romania (in the EU since 2007) through the prism of their exports structure convergence to Germany, the strongest EU economy, in the years 2000–2014.