Seeking for a development strategy for Peru in a volatile global economy

This article assesses the possibility of improving the development of the external economic sector in Latin America as a whole and in Peru in particular, by analyzing the theory of international trade and current economic trends in the world. By using statistics from the foreign trade sector and considering global trends in the international trade over the past decade, a special emphasis on the period 2019-2020 assesses Peru's ability to meet the growing differentiated demand, and thus, specialize in advantageous sectors, allowing them to integrate into global supply chains, providing resources (such as inputs or final products), goods and services at different market levels. According to the agency specialized in commercial intelligence, "Fresh Fruit", Peru is among the top 20 food suppliers in the world. Taking into account this potential and its diversified offer, it has been determined that there is a real possibility of creating value chains around the niches of the market that exist within the global trade. This study uses the comparative advantage theory as a basis for quantifying the competitiveness of products from global comparisons, which allows us to indicate how to move towards a higher level of specialization in the production and exporting structure (Lauterbach, 2015). As a result, twenty products were obtained with a positive trend in their exports, and twelve products that, despite having lower figures in their exports, have a higher growth potential. Copyright © 2021. Oleg N. Zhilkin, Wilmer P. Chavarry G. and Diana P. Chavarry. Distributed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International CC-BY 4.0