DEVELOPMENT OF THE FAIR TRADE BUSINESS CONCEPT IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC AND GERMAN-SPEAKING COUNTRIES

In a broader context, Fair Trade business concept is perceived as one of the alternative forms of sales. The Fair Trade concept can be understood as an expression of solidarity between the countries of the rich global North and the poorer global South. Within the European space, this concept is characterized by differences in terms of development over time, in the intensity of the phenomenon, also in the commodity structure of the marketed production. Fair Trade has a long tradition especially in the German-speaking countries of Europe. In the Czech Republic, the ideas of this movement began to emerge relatively later. The aim of the paper is to compare trends of selected indicators of individual countries (German-speaking countries and Czech Republic) through the application of the beta convergence method and to identify trends of convergence or distance of selected indicators. The theoretical background of this paper is based on an analysis of secondary sources gained from scholarly papers and specialized literature. The beta convergence method was used for comparison. The results are discuss with other author's findings.