This paper investigates whether various measures of capacity pressure or available production capacity may help predict the dynamics of exports from the EU countries in Central and Eastern Europe. The analysis uses annual panel data for the 11 countries from 2001 to 2019. Reduced-form estimations reveal that measures of cost competitiveness have little or no predictive power. The measures of capacity pressure are capacity utilisation in industry, the unemployment rate and the output gap, and they are all robust predictors of the dynamics of exports. The results are robust to various changes in the time and country sample, control variables and specification, and they also hold in structural panel vector autoregressive models.