Mapping competitive pressure between China and EU countries

China's impressive export growth over past decades has raised concerns that European producers might be driven out of their traditional markets by cheap Chinese products. Further, the more subdued global demand that has been seen in recent years will lead to intensified competition over existing consumer markets. Hence, we see a growing need for in-depth knowledge regarding the competitiveness of European exporters. This policy brief offers a comprehensive analysis of how European exporters - particularly exporters from central, eastern and south-eastern Europe - performed in the 2000s relative to China, which has been the world's number one exporter since 2008. While we find that Chinese and European producers coexisted in a large number of product markets during that period, the results also point to a gradual increase in the number of product markets that are being discovered by Chinese exporters and then abandoned by European exporters, particularly exporters from smaller countries and those on the periphery of the EU. At the same time, incidences of European exporters entering a market that is not yet served by China have become far less common, with Germany being the sole exception in this regard. Thus, we conclude that European exporters should be encouraged not only to enter new markets in order to withstand competition from China, but also to maintain their presence in existing export markets, especially in times of economic turbulence - i.e. when demand conditions are cyclically weak. After all, research in this field has shown that it is easier to revive established trade links after a downturn than to establish new trade links.