Comparative advantage of olive oil in Sfax region (Tunisia).

Olive oil is Tunisia’s leading agri-food export, accounting for almost half the value of the country’s agricultural exports. The evolution of the world economic context towards the liberalisation of trade will probably lead to increasingly competitive markets and will require an improvement in the competitiveness of Tunisian olive oil. This paper is limited to a brief presentation of the main issues involved in analysing the competitiveness of oil olive production using policy analysis matrices (PAMs) applied to the Sfax region (Tunisia) with a view to identifying variables on which policies for improving competitiveness could be focused. The results show that oil olive production has a significant comparative advantage in most of the production systems analysed.