Analyzing the impact of Fukushima nuclear wastewater discharge on seafood trade with gravity model

Abstract

The immediate influence of Fukushima nuclear wastewater (FNW) discharge is the world seafood trade. The gravity model is introduced to capture the World seafood trade under the effect of FNW discharge with the consideration of the trade communities and public opinions. The trade communities capture the closeness of seafood trade relations among countries and is investigated by the complex network method. The public opinions are related to the citizen's attitudes on FNW discharge, which affects the consumption of seafoods from Japan and thus the trade quantities. The validity of the proposed model is clarified by the Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood (PPML) methods. The proposed model provides the more reasonable estimation of the seafood trade quantities among the main seafood trade countries by incorporating the factors of trade communities and public opinions. With 10-year seafood trade data and public opinions from Google Trends on FNW discharge, we found that the trade community and public opinion have significant impacts on the seafood trade quantities between Japan and the counties in the same community.