Abstract

The world economy has evolved in recent years amid some obvious inequalities and disparities nationally manifested on different levels, including the participation in international trade. This study took into account the two ways of approach, namely: evaluation and analysis of existing differences between the countries participating in global trade, on the one hand and development of a hierarchy among them, on the other hand, in terms of export, import and trade balance. Therefore, the analysis methodology specific to regional series was used, namely the territorial statistical indicators and multicriteria ranking. We also considered the changes made to the country with the best performance in the period 2002 to 2008, time for which official figures were used at the time of the study. The data used in the study have been taken from on-line databases available on the website of the Romanian National Statistics Institute: http://www.insse.ro/ and they refer to 41 countries for which information was available, data processed in order to be harmonized by authors, taking into account both the emerging countries (China, Romania, Greece, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia, Nigeria, Brazil etc.) and the economically developed countries (USA, Germany, Japan, United Kingdom etc.).