Introduction
More than 95% of the world’s seabream and seabass production comes from aquaculture, of which 97% is produced by Mediterranean countries. The main producers are Turkey and Greece, while the main consumers are Spain, France, and Italy (Carvalho and Guillen, 2021). The Greek aquaculture industry is highly export oriented as approximately 80% of production is exported, while the remaining 20% is sold in the domestic market. On the other hand, Turkey is the biggest non-EU competitor in the Mediterranean species (Boufidis-Asimakopoulos, 2019). Both countries are neighbors whereby they share the same water and consequently the have similar potential in this kind of species production (Boufidis-Asimakopoulos, 2019). However, being outside the E uropean Union, Turkey’s aquaculture is not subjected to the European Commission Directives addressing the mandatory standards for such activities, the ban of subsidies for exports, and extra tariffs on imports (Boufidis-Asimakopoulos, 2019). This fact gives a significant advantage for Turkish products with lower production costs and lower prices.
The purpose of this work is to analyze the differences in profitability between the Greek and Turkish marine aquaculture firms, as well as which are the most relevant factors to explain firm s’ profitability. This analysis is important to evaluate the competitiveness of the Greek aquaculture industry and to plan future policy actions. Different variables should be jointly merged to capture the overall complexity of the firm performance since firm competitiveness is considered as “multi-faceted” in nature (Dvouletý and Blažková, 2021). Thus, profitability is subjected to simultaneous effects of many factors ( internal and external) and jointly determine the competitive strength of an individual firm and, consequently, its financial performance (Szymańska, 2017) . In accordance with theoretical perspectives of the industrial organization and the strategic management (e.g., the structure-conduct-performance paradigm, the market-based view, or the resource-based view), different empirical studies have been carried out to explore the determinants of firm profitability. Their findings indicate that there are three different categories that those determinants can be classified into (Slade, 2004; Pervan et al., 2019): (i) firm-specific variables, (ii) industry-specific variables, and (iii) macro-economic variables. A sample of marine aquaculture firms from Greece and Turkey operating over the 2011-2020 period have been identified in the Orbis database and selected for this research. Annual economic and financial data of those firms was collected to carry out our analysis (see Table 1). In addition, we also use industry (meso) and country (macro) data to complete this analysis (see Table 2). The results obtained with our profitability model are showed in Table 3.
References
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